Would a 5900rpm sata HD suffice for new pc build

Hey mpc family. Im finally building a new quad core pc. My parts came in the mail and i see that my hard drive is 5900rpm. Ive read diiferent things online but would like to ask for opinions with people that do the same tasks as I (recording). Would this 1tb 5900 rpm sata drive be sufficient to use for recording with ableton and reaper, or should i pull out an old 80gb 7200 rpm to use as an audio drive in conjuction with the 1tb which i would then use for the os and programs? thanks

Depends on your needs, but a 5400rpm drive can play a LOT of audio tracks. I would recommend using your 80GB, 7200RPM drive for OS and programs, and your 1TB 5400RPM drive for samples and audio.

At the very least, try it before you go spend more money.

"Depends on your needs"...... well my track usage normally ranges from 12-14 tracks. (most ever used was 24). I usually first sample most sounds into the mpc and drums into S3000. I like to get my ideas and sketches into the mpc/s3000 b4 i track out. I then use the 10 inputs on my control surface to record the audio into.

Go old school and get a SCSI HD... 10000 RPM!!!

JUKE 179r wrote:Go old school and get a SCSI HD... 10000 RPM!!!

they had some old school cheetah drives that pushed 15k rpm... but you need lots of those since they were small.


I agree with the idea of OS on the 80 and general storage on the laptop drive.

Personally, I'd stick with a 7200 rpm or higher drive to guarantee higher track count & optimum performance.

JUKE 179r wrote:Go old school and get a SCSI HD... 10000 RPM!!!

Yep, still rocking a 36 gig 10k fugitsu drive I've had for years. Wouldn't trade the performance for anything less.

I feel you shouldnt limit this build by hard disk performance..hard disk in my i7 build is the bottleneck atm...it's a 10k RPM 300gb sata velociraptor. windows index score gets crippled by hard drive performance to 5.9, while everything else is in mid 7's


I'd use that disk for storage rather than OS and app device...and either get a 7200rpm or 10rpm disk in raid or better yet 60gb SSD if you can swing it

faze1 wrote:"Depends on your needs"...... well my track usage normally ranges from 12-14 tracks. (most ever used was 24). I usually first sample most sounds into the mpc and drums into S3000. I like to get my ideas and sketches into the mpc/s3000 b4 i track out. I then use the 10 inputs on my control surface to record the audio into.

A 5400rpm drive should be fine for your needs. At least try it. If you hadn't yet purchased the drive, I'd say go for the faster drive, but there's really no good reason to spend more money at this point. Unless you find that it doesn't meet your needs.

Well I was able to go to comp usa and get the 1tb 7200 for an additional $4 since they i guess get their parts from tiger direct where i ordered it from. So now i have the 1tb and another 80gb 7200 i could use. Given they are the same speed (rpm wise, but i think the 1tb has faster data transfer speeds), which should i use for OS and apps, and which one for samples and recording?

....And i had one of those cheetah 10k rpm drives back in the day. I think it was 18 gigs lol. Had it hooked up to an old pc back when i had my first sampler (yamaha RS7000) lol

faze1 wrote:which should i use for OS and apps,

the smaller one

faze1 wrote:and which one for samples and recording?

the bigger one

Cool thanks MP# and everyone eles that chimed in. That avatar is crazy (mp3) lmao!

Yeah I love it... forgot where I found it but I didn't create it.

what's funny is that my homeboy got all types of videos like that where the dude is standing up lecturing behind some lame ass fake nature background. I WISH he had this one... I can just imagine what he's talking about.

I'd probably partition that 1tb disk...

Why is that?

number of reasons...

Protecting or isolating files, to make it easier to recover a corrupted file system or operating system installation. If one partition is corrupted, none of the other file systems are affected, and the drive's data may still be salvageable. Having a separate partition for read-only data also reduces the chances of the file system on this partition becoming corrupted.

Raising overall computer performance on systems where smaller file systems are more efficient. For instance, large hard drives with only one NTFS file system typically have a very large sequentially accessed Master File Table (MFT) and it generally takes more time to read this MFT than the smaller MFTs of smaller partitions.

"Short Stroking", which aims to minimize performance-eating head repositioning delays by reducing the number of tracks used per hard drive.[1] The basic idea is that you make one partition approx. 20-25% of the total size of the drive. This partition is expected to: occupy the outer tracks of the hard drive, and offer more than double the throughput — less than half the access time. If you limit capacity with short stroking, the minimum throughput stays much closer to the maximum.


For example a 1 TB disk might have an access time of 12 ms at 200 IOPS (at a limited queue depth) with an average throughput of 100 MB/s. When it is partitioned to 100 GB (and the rest left unallocated) you might end up with an access time of 6 ms at 300 IOPS (with a bigger queue depth) with an average throughput of 200 MB/s..