For a dedicated Renoise machine, would the choice of HDD (harddisc drive) matter much? (Well, except for the size.) If I understand it correctly, Renoise doesn’t (yet) support audio streaming – but to what extent DOES it rely on the HDD? In what aspects?
For example, would it perform better on a SSD, a WD Velociraptor, or 2xHDD in Raid0?
Would you advice to use the faster HDD for the OS and a regular drive for the sample collection and rendered audiotracks, or vice versa?
I’m a bit confused in regard to these issues. My initial idea was to install an ordinary 7200 rpm 640 GB HDD for the OS and softwares, and an additional Velociraptor 10.000 rpm 300 GB drive for the audio (and VSTi sample banks). But now I’m not sure if this is really optimal. At least not for Renoise. Maybe it would work better for e.g. Sonar 8 (which I use for the master mixdowns and arranging).
the HD will only be a crucial performance factor if you’re using renoise respectively. that means:
if you use a lot of software samplers hooked to huge libraries (for example kontakt with VSL lib, symphobia, EWQL libs, all simultaniously with multiple channels / tracks) that support DFD (direct from disc) access, then the harddisk will become an important key to the complexity and amount of channels your machine can take before it stalls or starts to produce hickups.
in that case, i’d recommend a velociraptor since it provides both: rather low random access and high sequential reads. the velociraptor is currently the fastest consumer HD to buy without a doubt. really good SSDs, like the Intel X25-M, are of course better than any HD out there in terms of performance, but you get a really lousy price per gb ratio.
so if you really wanna have top notch, either go for SSD or SAS (serial scsi), whereas the latter would involve buying a rather costy controller beforehand.
but the big question is if the profile actually suits your demands and your way of working with renoise… if you’re only working with renoise’s internal sampler, VST synths and other common plugins, then any current 7.200rpm SATA drive should serve you well.
anyways… if you can’t decide, don’t wanna compromise and have about 18.000 EUR to blow, then you can always get something like this of course.
I thought SSD drives were risky when using frequent write and delete actions? The same as with ordinary SD storage which aren’t suitable for defragmentation matters… (Lifespan degration)
Hard drive speed affects EVERYTHING due to virtual memory swap files. That said, the way hard drive setup affects other apps should be similar to they way they affect Renoise. I’d check out some HD video editing forums on this topic if I were you
example: intel’s X25-M 80GB SSD is specified with a life expectancy of 1.2 million hours mean time before fail (MTBF).
for comparison: western digital’s velociraptor has a MTBF of 1.4 million hours.
so yeah, SSD still tend to fail earlier than usual harddrives, but i think the gap isn’t as wide as most people think it would be.
but whenever SSD start to die, they will die exponentially, because every cell is (with current tech) written with 3bit.
@byte-smasher
i have to contradict - there is absolutely no swapping going on if you’re working with renoise in a scenario, where all sample + plugin data has already been loaded into physical memory. that of course presumes that everything fits into the RAM.
for the average renoise user however, that should be the case.
besides that i’m not even sure if renoise is able to use the virtual memory anyways. over here i get “out of memory” messages as soon as the smallest fragment of the physical RAM does not suffice to load the sample / plugin.
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