Building a new DAW - What do you guys think of this setup?

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
Rationalizer
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Re: Building a new DAW - What do you guys think of this setup?

Post by Rationalizer » Wed Mar 30, 2011 8:42 am

joewalch wrote:I had a quick look into SSDs. It seems the bottleneck is often the SATA interface. Apparently your better of with a pcie hard drive like the one from ocz.
Yep, but the Revodrive is also a bit more expensive and, of course, requires a free pci-e slot.
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Sibanger
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Re: Building a new DAW - What do you guys think of this setup?

Post by Sibanger » Wed Mar 30, 2011 8:45 am

^^
If you are going for an SSD, as McQ714 has said, 64g could find yourself short.
Going for 128 + is very good advice.
If you haven't got the $$ for a larger SSD, don't bother and stick with standard hard drive/s.

Sometimes size matters :wink:

Nokatus
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Re: Building a new DAW - What do you guys think of this setup?

Post by Nokatus » Wed Mar 30, 2011 8:53 am

Size requirements for the system drive depend solely on what you're going to install on it, and how. If you know you're not going to need more, 64 gigabytes will be perfectly fine.

I know for a fact it would be enough for me: my dedicated audio workstation system drive currently has about 30 gigabytes in use.

It's an entirely different matter whether you wish to invest in SSDs that can hold content like disk streamed sample libraries as well, however :)

Rationalizer
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Re: Building a new DAW - What do you guys think of this setup?

Post by Rationalizer » Wed Mar 30, 2011 3:01 pm

Nokatus wrote:Size requirements for the system drive depend solely on what you're going to install on it, and how. If you know you're not going to need more, 64 gigabytes will be perfectly fine.

I know for a fact it would be enough for me: my dedicated audio workstation system drive currently has about 30 gigabytes in use.

It's an entirely different matter whether you wish to invest in SSDs that can hold content like disk streamed sample libraries as well, however :)
^ This.
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McQ714
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Re: Building a new DAW - What do you guys think of this setup?

Post by McQ714 » Wed Mar 30, 2011 3:42 pm

Rationalizer wrote:
McQ714 wrote:3 big reasons to have win7 pro installed... 1)remote desktop client and host; 2)ability to backup to a network drive; and 3) file encryption (which you may not use but still good to have).
All very useful features for DAW, eh?
don't think outside the box much, eh?
they can be useful... ability to connect to a secondary computer you might have without the need for two monitors or a kvm switch and use the 2nd computer as a VST host or storage of some sort. now i realize with the power of newer CPUs, you don't always need another computer but if you have one laying around, why not give it a try?i'll leave you to figure out how a network drive could benefit a DAW computer. and like i said file encryption is not necessary but can be useful.
Rationalizer wrote:
McQ714 wrote:and don't waste ur money on a 64gb ssd drive...
I've got a 64gb ssd for my DAW computer. Installed all the programs I need and I still have about 40% free space. And I have quite a lot software but I installed only the programs to my ssd and all the other content to my other HDD's. Oh, and there's the price... 128GB ssd is double the price of 64GB. Of course if you have the money then get it. But just for boosting up program startup times 250 euro is a bit much IMO.
you have no idea what programs he has or what he will be installing to the SSD drive. just because it works for you doesn't mean it'll work for him. he may very well max that thing out. my work computer has 30 gb between windows, ms office, quickbooks, and the few essential utility programs. this doesn't even include all of my doc files that those programs generate. if you're on a laptop with just the OS and 1 other piece of software, then fine use the 64gb SSD. but if you have Live and Reason and Traktor and about 30-40 VSTs, go bigger! what's the point of having a SSD if you're not going to run all of your software from it??? by all means though, check what you have currently installed on you main system drive. if it'll fit on 64gb, guess you have no reason to spend the extra cash.

McQ714
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Re: Building a new DAW - What do you guys think of this setup?

Post by McQ714 » Wed Mar 30, 2011 3:52 pm

Nokatus wrote:Size requirements for the system drive depend solely on what you're going to install on it, and how. If you know you're not going to need more, 64 gigabytes will be perfectly fine.

I know for a fact it would be enough for me: my dedicated audio workstation system drive currently has about 30 gigabytes in use.

It's an entirely different matter whether you wish to invest in SSDs that can hold content like disk streamed sample libraries as well, however :)

way to state the obvious..

if you know you have $100M in the bank, spending $50K in one night in Vegas will be prefectly fine.
what i don't get is why anyone would put an SSD drive in just to run the OS??? doesn't make any sense to me.

Nokatus
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Re: Building a new DAW - What do you guys think of this setup?

Post by Nokatus » Thu Mar 31, 2011 12:35 am

McQ714 wrote:what i don't get is why anyone would put an SSD drive in just to run the OS??? doesn't make any sense to me.
Not just the OS, all of the software. That's what I meant when I said all of it on my DAW system partition fits into 30 gigabytes or so. Live and Renoise, NI and Spectrasonics stuff, U-He, IKM and Camel Audio plugins, and a load more. But yep, all the libraries are on another drive.

If one wants to run all the associated libraries from an SSD, it's an entirely different matter (as I said), and in that case even a 128GB one will very probably feel small. Why run only the OS and other binaries from and SSD? Mainly because of the loading times.
McQ714 wrote:you have no idea what programs he has or what he will be installing to the SSD drive. just because it works for you doesn't mean it'll work for him.
Way to state the obvious, eh? :)

Speaking only for myself here, but I (obviously) didn't mean my personal mileage to be the general rule. Instead, I merely wrote it as an example of how it's not at all a given that a modern DAW needs a huge system partition/drive. The whole point was to avoid that kind of generalization.

alekst1923
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Re: Building a new DAW - What do you guys think of this setup?

Post by alekst1923 » Thu Mar 31, 2011 12:40 am

get 1600mhz ram brah!

McQ714
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Re: Building a new DAW - What do you guys think of this setup?

Post by McQ714 » Thu Mar 31, 2011 1:44 am

Nokatus wrote:
McQ714 wrote:what i don't get is why anyone would put an SSD drive in just to run the OS??? doesn't make any sense to me.
Not just the OS, all of the software. That's what I meant when I said all of it on my DAW system partition fits into 30 gigabytes or so. Live and Renoise, NI and Spectrasonics stuff, U-He, IKM and Camel Audio plugins, and a load more. But yep, all the libraries are on another drive.

If one wants to run all the associated libraries from an SSD, it's an entirely different matter (as I said), and in that case even a 128GB one will very probably feel small. Why run only the OS and other binaries from and SSD? Mainly because of the loading times.

you must have a magical drive.

between my OS drive which also carries miscellaneous utility programs and my audio program drive which has all of my audio software along with all of my VSTs, i use approximately 125gb. some of that may be reverb impulses and VST settings/presets but that doesn't include Live library or NI Komplete 7 library and certainly not the 100s of gb of wav files i have.

so i'll guess we'll just agree on the fact that 64gb does not work for everyone and may not work for him.

Rationalizer
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Re: Building a new DAW - What do you guys think of this setup?

Post by Rationalizer » Thu Mar 31, 2011 4:59 am

McQ714 wrote:
Rationalizer wrote:
McQ714 wrote:3 big reasons to have win7 pro installed... 1)remote desktop client and host; 2)ability to backup to a network drive; and 3) file encryption (which you may not use but still good to have).
All very useful features for DAW, eh?
don't think outside the box much, eh?
It's not that. Just trying to answer the question he asked in this thread. He did say he was building a daw...
McQ714 wrote:
Rationalizer wrote:I've got a 64gb ssd for my DAW computer. Installed all the programs I need and I still have about 40% free space. And I have quite a lot software but I installed only the programs to my ssd and all the other content to my other HDD's. Oh, and there's the price... 128GB ssd is double the price of 64GB. Of course if you have the money then get it. But just for boosting up program startup times 250 euro is a bit much IMO.
you have no idea what programs he has or what he will be installing to the SSD drive. just because it works for you doesn't mean it'll work for him.
That's, of course, true. But how does the same logic not apply to you then? Or do you perhaps have some inside information about the contents he's about to install?

I'm merely referring to my empirical information. What are you basing your arguments on?
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Nokatus
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Re: Building a new DAW - What do you guys think of this setup?

Post by Nokatus » Thu Mar 31, 2011 10:02 am

McQ714 wrote:so i'll guess we'll just agree on the fact that 64gb does not work for everyone and may not work for him.
Haha, of course :)

But yeah, just checked, over 200 plugins installed on my system drive - whoa, I need to clean up, many unused free effect offerings in there. Overall usage with the OS, host software, sample editor and miscellaneous utils totals about 30 gigabytes. Taking a compressed Ghost image of that partition takes about 15 gigabytes (I do this for a living and like to keep things tidy and backed up). Nothing particularly magical in that.

Anyway, now is the time to pull back from a thread derail. I'm actually considering building a new primary workstation as well, so anyone sharing more of their current DAW building experiences would be very welcome. Motherboards, audio interfaces, what works and what doesn't. The Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD3-B3 motherboard seems to pop up repeatedly when checking out threads for Sandy Bridge DAWs, any comments on that particular board?

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