Go Back   Cockos Incorporated Forums > REAPER Forums > newbieland

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 01-14-2022, 01:33 PM   #1
redddog
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Feb 2010
Posts: 174
Default Hard Disk Configuration for System Expansion

Hey Guys.

My current set up is 2 disks -

1 - Samsung 970 EVO Plus Series - 250GB PCIe NVMe - M.2 Which I have OS, Reaper, EZD2 and a couple other VSTIs on.

1 - 500 GB Western Digital spinner for song files and audio.

I want to maximize my disk game as I'm about to start a project that will see my system expand from a VSTI perspective. I'll be adding Kontact and quite a few libraries. I've heard that the minimum should be 3 disks and that 1 should be for OS and programs only, 1 should be just for song files and audio and 1 for samples from libraries and VSTIs.

I have no idea what HDs to use for each and the sizes I should consider for each. I feel like the Samsung 970 EVO plus should be good to go for the OS/program disk - especially given how light Reaper is.

I'm also at a loss for how to transfer the right stuff from my current HD set-up to the new set up.

Anyone know how to get me off on the right foot?
redddog is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-14-2022, 02:01 PM   #2
nait
Human being with feelings
 
nait's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jun 2018
Location: Edmonton, AB, Canada
Posts: 1,391
Default

Honestly, I'm not sure if there are that big of gains of having separate drives, but I do personally have several drives in my PC. More so just because I started with this much space.. it wasn't enough.. I bumped up adding another drive, and so on and so on. In my own PC, I have O/S and some VSTs on a Samsung 960 Evo (NVMe), my Reaper projects/Renders qand some VSTs/libraries on a 1TB Crucial P1 (NVMe)... some non-music related stuff on a 1TB Samsung 980 (NVMe), and some VSTs/libraries on regular SATA 3 drives (a Samsung 840 Pro and a Seagate Barracuda 120). I have a lot of crap. lol Lots of Kontakt libraries I've collected over the time, for example.


With what you have, you'll probably want your O/S sitting on the SSD. 250GB is a good size for Windows, plus some other stuff. Just be careful about how much "other stuff" you add in there, as things can quickly add up.. but you should be good with 250. Reaper can sit there too.

As far as mechanical drives, I personally dislike them, but see how things go. Your most likely issue with a mechanical drive is it will take a bit longer to render to it, and it will take a bit longer to read large libraries from it. YMMV though, depending on what you're doing. In a perfect world, all your data would be sitting on NVMe SSDs (or even SATA3 SSDs), but we only have so much money to work with, unfortunately! lol

I don't really think there's much (if any) advantage to isolating everything as you described though, especially song files/audio from samples/libraries, but I do like to keep all those things separated from where the O/S is located (even if just by partitioning). Reason being, if you reformat/reinstall Windows, you don't lose all that other stuff.

If you had several drives of the same speed, I'd think the average Reaper user would be over-thinking things by worrying about isolating stuff on different drives. But in your case, I think installing the O/S and Reaper and a few things in need of zippier speeds you can fit on it would be good.

SSDs are fairly cheap nowadays. Ideally you dump the mechanical drives except for longer-term storage (backups, etc.). The basic Samsung 980 1TB (NVMe) is only $110 right now, for example. That's the non-Pro, but I have one of these and it's a super fast drive. That's even cheaper than the Samsung 870 Evo 1TB (SATA III). Crazy.
__________________
My Rig (also serves as my gaming PC): MSI Mag X570 Tomahawk Mobo, Ryzen R9 3900X, 32GB RAM, Samsung 960 Evo 500gb NVMe, Crucial 1TB NVMe, NVidia RTX 2080 Super, Arturia Minifuse 2, Nektar Impact LX25+ MIDI Controller Keyboard.
nait is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -7. The time now is 05:36 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.11
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions Inc.