A question or two about Hard Drives....

[c-minus]

I notice a lot of folks talking about having a hard drive for the operating system, and a second for audio files, or some variation thereof. Are these external drives that you just hook up with USB, or do they need to be installed internally? Either/or? The PC I'm looking to get is a quad core, 16gb ram, 2Tb drive, 3.5 ghz/4.0 turbo. Would I even need a 2nd drive to smoothly run Reaper? I want to be able to handle track counts in the 20's, and while I'm not TOO plugin-crazy, I don't want to be crashing or hanging up because of dropping a few convolution reverbs or whatnot. If I AM going to be shopping for another drive, any recommendations would be greatly appreciated. I've heard good things about the Samsung 850 evo, some of the WD drives, etc.
Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions!

[Coachz]

I use 3 drives but two should be enough. All internal SATA, you don't want externals unless they are eSata for the speed. One for OS and one for reaper project and samples (my 3rd drive has samples).

I don't know brands but if you use a temperature monitoring program you can probably get plenty of life out of most brands.

now is a good time to get a quiet setup.
http://www.bequiet.com/en/DarkBase900

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/519...iew/index.html

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/intel...cooler-review/

[c-minus]

Thanks for your quick response! I am a total noob when it comes to PC recording! Been using an iPad with Auria up until now.
Looking through my old stuff, I realized I have a brand new (old) Seagate Barracuda ST380011A (7200 rpm, 80gb) which I had purchased a few years ago as a backup for my old BOSS BR-1600CD. Wonder if this would be any help to me?.....

[Coachz]

Those are IDE drives and with a new computer I would just go with SATA for the speed increase.

[DVDdoug]

Two drives can help in certain situations, such as using one drive for your source files and another for your destination files when you render. That saves the read/write head from having to jump-around between reading & writing locations. Sometimes with video, that can cut my rendering time in half (but in practice I usually don't do it that way).

But if you are mixing several tracks, the head is going to be jumping around anyway and you're only saving the time jumping to the write-track.

It may also help to put virtual instruments on a separate drive.

A solid state drive doesn't have a read/write head, so that's not an issue.

Otherwise, keeping the OS & applications on a different drive doesn't make that much difference, since once the OS & application are loaded & running there's not a lot of reading/writing of those files.

I have two drives in my systems mostly for "organizational purposes" (keeping the OS & applications separate from the data), and usually I have a clone partition on the 2nd drive as a back-up of the operating system and applications. The clone/backup is only reason I actually "need" another physical drive.

I've also got partitions for my regular "entertainment" audio & video files (MP3 & DVD files), so I keep that separate from any audio/video stuff I'm working on.

Of course, my laptop only has one internal drive, but I have a separate partition for my MP3s. I can't fit all of my DVD files on the 1TB laptop drive, but I have them on a 4TB USB drive.

[xaptronic]

I'm running everything off an ASUS zenbook. Most of my projects have a couple guitar tracks, bass and a midi drum track that goes through MT Power drummer.

My HD is an SSD and I haven't yet had any problems with disk speed.

The strategy of having a data drive and an OS drive is a common practice in various industries. There are a number of advantages and reasons why people do this, that I won't get into here.

But I would say, in general, that unless you have a good reason to do so, if you are just starting out and don't already have this setup or know how to do it, you could safely avoid doing so until such time as disk speed or storage becomes a problem.