[ardour-users] hard drive speed

[Joe Cooper]

Djamel Ouerdane wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm about to get a new computer. I read on ardour's webpage that a hard 
> disk
> of at least 7200 rpm is required. Unfortunately, for some reasons, I 
> could only get
> a disk of 4200 rpm.  Would it be a good idea to buy a faster external 
> hard drive and use
> the USB 2  port for data transfer ?? I don't know much about all these 
> things and I don't
> want to wait for an upgrade of my system (a Dell Latitude notebook).
> Thanks for any info.

You can get internal 7200 RPM disks for laptops right now.  Toshiba and 
IBM make them.  Seagate makes a 5400 RPM laptop drive, too.

Laptops historically aren't well-suited for serious multi-track audio 
work (though for 2, 4 and possibly 5.1 work, a nicely equipped one will 
do fine).  The drives in particular are quite slow and none of the 
laptop manufacturers have felt the need to go faster.  But with USB2 or 
Firewire, it might be wholly possible to get good multi-track 
performance from a laptop.  A friend does video work on an iMac with an 
external FireWire disk, and it seems to work fine for him.  Video has 
similar disk throughput needs to audio, so it seems a reasonable comparison.
-- 
Joe Cooper <joe at swelltech.com>
Web caching appliances and support.
http://www.swelltech.com