There's some people saying (and tests sometimes seem to prove it) that larger drives, due to their sectors sometimes being closer to each other, probably also due to the number of read heads, actually perform better, simply because all the involved movements become smaller, hence faster.P.T. wrote:Is there any difference in performance between, say, a 500gb drive and a 1 terabyte drive?
Whether that is really true on what is a mechanical drive after all - I don't know.
Personally, I think there's not exactly a noticeable difference between, say, a 250 GB and a 1 TB drive.
The more important factors being seek and access times and probably onboard cache. These should be of relevance for audio work. Especially when dealing with diskstreaming samplers, you want pretty fast seek/access times.
However, to me, one thing is most important: Reliability. Now, nobody can guarantee that a drive won't fail at one point in time, that's why I completely rely on personal experiences (fortunately I have lots of experiences when it comes to drives). In the past, I've seen all kind of drive brands fail, including Maxtor, Seagate, WD, IBM, etc. I have yet to see a Samsung drive fail, and that's precisely why the last 5-6 drives I bought (3.5" and 2.5") were Samsungs exclusively. But as said, that's just my personal experience, "absolute" numbers may look differently.
Further, I think it's always better to distribute tasks to different drives.
As a really obvious example: Let's suppose you set up all your system on one drive only (which is regularly backed up, so I'm not talking about actual data loss here at all). Now that very drive fails. What you will have to do is to not only restore your OS but also your samples, audio data and what not. Alternatively, you may have everything installed on 3 drives instead, let's say OS, samples and data (your song files and whatever). Now, whenever one drive fails, you only need to restore that one, which, depending on the amount of data we deal with, can be quite a time saviour. Especially in these days of massively sized sample libraries, restoring a drive with, say, 3-400 gigs of samples will take you quite a while.
Plus, different "items" need different backup schedules. For instance, it's not that relevant to backup my sample drive very often. The samples often already exist another time (on the installation DVDs for instance) and I may not do too much changes to the sample drive's content that often, either.
Same goes for the OS drive. In case you don't install new things very often (and keep track of the smaller things, such as, say, your VST folder), there's no need to backup your whole system that often.
But it's an entirely different story with anything you create yourself. Obviously, as digital musicians, we're talking song data here. But it's not only that. There's several other data that you "create" on a daily base. Just a few examples: pictures that you drag from your camera, emails, documents (such as invoices), movies recorded via DVBT, browser bookmarks etc. etc. - and of course also downloads (which you could probably re-download, but it's quite an effort and sometimes impossible).
All that data needs to be backed up quite regularly and in case you don't want to do it manually, it's rather clever to have all these on a drive as tidy as possible, so you can simply take an image or copy the entire content rather quickly.
Then, there's another very good reason for using multiple drives, this time indeed related to performance. Streaming samplers can still put a really high load onto your disks (even with these days fast drives), so you may want to distribute various tasks. For instance, for a typical high-end-ish audio machine it'd be a good idea to have one system drive, one audio drive and, say, 2 more drives for streaming samples (let's say one for Kontakt, one for BFD or so). Obviously, such a scenario works best in case you got 4 separate disk controllers in your box (most modern machines should have). That way, disk loads are separated as good as it gets.
This is pretty much what my to-be-built-somewhen-this-year Windows PC will look like, with an additional (external) RAID system (probably with two 1 TB drives in RAID 1 mode) for permanent backups and another (hopefully internal) drive for temporary backups.
The good thing about all this: Drives these days are dead cheap (with prices still falling each day), so everybody can afford a decent drive arrangement, especially in case one's using a desktop machine.
Cheers
Sascha