Hard Drives

Not a construction problem but worth saying anyway: If you have any files or definitions that you have created stored on any hard drive, you should BACK UP YOUR FILES REGULARLY. Watch my lips - DO YOUR BACKUPS!

For your VTPO PC I recommend that you use one or more SATA II HDDs regardless of system. Even if your motherboard doesn't support SATA, you can buy a cheap plug-in PCI card to do the job. The speed of SATA II over IDE is well worth having.

There are various schools of thought on how many hard drives to use. You can use a single drive for everything or one drive for the operating system alone and one or more others for data, such as samples and definitions as well as configuration files. If you use a single drive then unless you want your PC to be 'minimalistic' buy one that is at least 200Gb capacity. For multi-drive systems an 80Gb or 120Gb model(these are cheap) for the operating system and perhaps some VTPO system functions/files, will be sufficient . This will be your normal bootable 'C' drive. Some people will recommend using two 80Gb drives in RAID Mirror (RAID 1), but I don't believe this to be necessary these days as the small drives are very reliable and it can be an unnecessary pain waiting up to 1/2 hour for a RAID rebuild after a power outage. In the rare event your 'C' drive really does become corrupted, it's inconvenient but no big deal to re-install everything, including the OS. You will be backing up your files won't you?

Don't get caught by the 10000RPM argument. Because they are probably 'Mil Spec', 10000RPM drives are expensive and almost always SATA I. A 7200RPM SATA II HDD has a much faster throughput than a 10000RPM SATA I.

Hard drives come with fixed memory caches which helps to speed up data transfer. Always go for the largest cache that you can afford, this really does help with data speed.

Although 80Gb or 120Gb may sound excessive, at the time of writing they are the most common of the smaller drives available and the extra capacity will be taken up by the operating system's Virtual Memory capability (swap-file).

For your storage drive (probably drive 'E' if you have a DVD drive installed in the 'D' position) you need to ensure that you have sufficient capacity for all of the files and samples that you propose to use, then add 10% for what you may have overlooked and another 20% for future expansion. Always buy bigger than your immediate needs if you can. Like most things in this world, the larger the pot, the more your 'stuff' will expand to fill it - also known as Parkinson´s Law!

As with the rest of the World, computer technology is constantly changing and this is immediately apparent in the world of permanent storage. Hard Drives are becoming huge and 1.5Tb is quite common and cheap, but there's another developing technology which uses 'flash' techniques and large flash HDDs are now becoming viable. Keep an eye on what's available. Remember that flash drives have no moving parts, so apart from excess heat, shock or volts, there's nothing to wear out. However, don't be tempted to use a removable USB thumb drive for permanent main storage, because they are just not fast enough for our purposes.

A single storage drive may be all that you'll need, but it's worth considering buying two identically sized drives for storage, especially if you find you have a need for ultimate data transfer speeds. Provided that you have a HDD controller that supports it, you can then configure the two drives in a RAID array as RAID striped (RAID 0) which greatly improves data read performance. Most of the latest motherboards have a built in RAID controller, but if you don't have one, they can be purchased cheaply as a PCI card. Don't do software RAID, hardware works best.

It's also worth remembering that you may well be going to install your PC inside a console and the last thing that you want is to have to do is to scrabble around in the back of the console trying to get the side off your PC because a HDD data cable came loose. It's my opinion that the current design of SATA data cable is an abomination! Remember, organs can produce a lot of bass which will rattle things loose given the chance, so to prevent future problems buy the cables that have a small metal clip to hold them firmly in place. They may cost slightly more than a standard one, but it's a wise investment, but of course if your cables never shake loose, you'll never know, will you?!! You will however have the satisfaction of knowing that you won't be embarassed in the middle of a concert by a SATA cable breakdown.