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Topic: What's a minimum or reccd. size computer for recording? |
David Mason
From:
Cambridge, MD, USA
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Posted 3 Nov 2010 4:27 am |
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My #1's motherboard died (no flowers plz) and I'm back to my backup... which has a bottleneck in the RAM size (?) when dealing with music files. I may have a computer specially-built, with two hard drives - one for normal stuff and one just for music. I know I can get huge hard drives, terabyte sized, but what would be a necessary amount of RAM for home recording? Are there other "bottleneck" points I should look at? Windows, not Apple.
All I was doing previously was recording some concerts off of sugarmegs.org and Wolfgang's Vault, putting them into a basic Cakewalk program and using that to cut them into songs, then to iTunes. But I want to ease* into recording guitar loops and such.
*(ease is the root of easy, I believe...) |
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Jack Stoner
From:
Kansas City, MO
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Posted 3 Nov 2010 5:53 am
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It depends on the Recording program you want to use. The new Sonar X1, for example, will require a minimum of a certain Intel CPU (for optimum performance). ProTools probably has similar hardware requirements.
If you are going to have a Windows 7, 64bit OS and a Recording Program, 8GB of RAM is suggested by most on the Sonar forum (what I have on my PC that I use for Sonar). On a Windows 7 64 bit OS (which is what the PC companies such as Dell, HP, Gateway, etc only have), Microsoft has minimum memory requirements - and Microsoft's minimums are not really practical usually it's at least double for real world minimum.
A Quad CPU is also the best choice for a "Recording DAW" PC.
As far as the hard drives, what I see on the Sonar forum is that many are putting Windows and programs on one hard drive and all the user data on a second hard drive. The theory behind that is if your primary hard drive (The "C" drive) crashes or fails you haven't lost any of your user data - other than that there is no reason to have separate drives. The Disk Operating System (Windows) could care less where the data is - all it knows it is on a hard drive and it accesses the drive. You need to do periodic backups of at a minimum your user data to some other storage device whether you have the user data on a separate drive or not (what happens if the drive that you have user data on dies - you are SOL and all is lost).
I have two 1TB drives in my DAW PC, one has everything on it and the other drive is strictly for backups. I use Acronis True Image disk backup software and make backups of the entire hard drive to the second hard drive. If the main hard drive would fail, or a Windows corruption, I can completely restore the drive to the condition of the last backup in about an hour.
Finally, what I tell all my clients when they ask about what they should buy for a new PC. "Buy Overkill" or "Buy as much as your pocketbook can stand". Buying more than you think you need today will save you replacing or upgrading tomorrow. |
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Jim Park
From:
Carson City, Nv
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Posted 3 Nov 2010 7:59 pm RE: Ram size for recording
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| I am using a Mac Mini with 2 GB's of ram and have recorded 10 tracks at a time live with no problem at all!!!! This is with Logic Express I am going to upgrade to a 7200 rpm drive though......... |
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Mike Davidson
From:
New Mexico, USA
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Posted 19 Nov 2010 11:40 am
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| Hard drives are the bottleneck on almost all systems. They have increased in size a great deal in the last decade however they have not increased exponentially in speed or technology. Also they are electro-mechanical. As mentioned it is common to use multiple drives primarily because you are getting multiple read/write heads almost like a RAID system. I utilized an older 3.2 processor with 1GB RAM with great success for many years because I used 4 WD Raptor Drives. |
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