Hard drive setup with WD blue & green HDDs

ambient · 10-25-2014, 06:59 AM

Should I keep my project files, WAVs, plugins, samples etc on the main (faster, smaller) drive with the OS, or move them to a new secondary (slower, larger) drive?

Until now I've been running a single 500GB WD caviar blue (7200 rpm) - OS and data on separate partitions.

I recently bought a 2TB caviar green (5400 rpm?) mainly for storage and to backup data from the main drive.

It is often said 7200rpm is the minimum for DAW work, but also that it's useful to have the OS and data running on separate physical drives.

Does the slower drive speed negate the benefit of having the OS and data on separate drives (and read/write heads)?

ivansc · 10-25-2014, 08:05 AM

To an extent, yes. I bought 1TB blacks. About the same price as a 2TB green at the time but usable for anything.
I have a 500gb Seagate (yuk!) as my OS drive, 1TB black for recorded DATA and a 2TB black for samples and everything else.

Needless to say I WILL be replacing that Seagate when I have the money and the time to do a mirror reinstall of my exiting drive!

Backed up all the crucial stuff to a combination of cloud storage as well.
Copy, Dropbox, Acer Cloud, Google Chrome Cloud... you name it.

cprompt · 10-25-2014, 04:02 PM

I have my OS and programs on a 1TB Samsung drive, all audio files and samples are on a 1TB WD Blue and plug-ins are on an older WD Raptor drive spinning at 10K.

If I could, I would run all WD Blacks, best drive out there. The Blues are a close second (and a lot cheaper), whereas the Greens are a no-no for anything other than backups. Forget about the Reds unless you are running them in a RAID array, and absolutely 100% forget about the Purples!

And as Ivan says, backup to the cloud, there's no excuse for it these days. especially with 15GB free from Google Drive and Outlook.com (hotmail). I pay a whopping £1.45 a month for 100GB of Drive. I also pay an equally massive 85 pence a month for 100GB for Hubic, from OVH, a French company (but not-so-critical stuff goes here).

I've had two seagate drives go bad on me over the years, never lost a WD. The Raptor I have at the moment must be 10 years old now and still going strong. Of course, I also leave my computer on 24/7 which may help!

ivansc · 10-26-2014, 01:03 AM

Just read a load of stuff on the "new" Samsung 850 Pro series solid state drives.

By the time I have sold the last of my superfluous music kit I hope the price on a 500gb one will have dropped to where I can afford that as system disk on my laptop....

Mink99 · 10-26-2014, 04:39 AM

Basic rule in all Win installations:

Never put anything on the system drive that is not system. No applications, no data, nothing.

so you can alwaYs upgrade, scratch, reformat reinstall your system without the risk of losing valuable projects.

ivansc · 10-26-2014, 08:43 AM

Nice idea but increasingly difficult to do with most installs these days insisting on using C:Program Files.
Back in the good old days of OS9 and AmigaOS you could put what you liked where you liked. I assume it is still that way for Linux/Unix in terms of what drive gets used.

Mink99 · 10-26-2014, 09:33 AM

The installers propose using c:/program Files, but this can be overwritten in most cases.