Help with DFD

[tchoyy]

Hi,

My main hard disk is a 3200 rpm and my libraries are on another hard disk (200 Gb, 7200 rpm)
When I want to use DFD, with 2 instruments, it doesn't work, as if I didn't have enough memory (the sound is cut).
Gold asks more memory than Silver, so that's why I want to use DFD.

Is this because my main hd is 3200 rpm ? Should I have both disks at 7200 rpm or did I missed something about DFD ? I assigned 248 reserved voices as recommanded...

Thanks.

[Petronome]

How much RAM do you have? Even though the DFD loads majority of a sample from hard-drive, it loads a small portion of it to RAM. That's why you DO need RAM even with the DFD. I have 512mb RAM and Silver, and I'm able to use about two instances of Silver with DFD on.

[tchoyy]

I have 1 Gig RAM.
I think it may be a matter of hard disk...

[tchoyy]

It seems to work better with these parameters :

Preload Buffer Size : 40 Kb
Voice Buffer Size : 96 kb
Reserved Voices : 248

Will I get a loss of quality with these parameters ?

[Petronome]

As far as I'm conserned, there is no quality loss with messing with the DFD settings. They only can affect to performance, i.e. the amount of samples you can play. And actually, there's no absolute 'best' settings, you have to find the settings that work best with your system. And apparently you found a better settings.

[tchoyy]

Thanks, I finished my demo with these settings, and It doesn't affect the quality ;)

[Sean R. Beeson]

If you notice the DFD light, which is normally yellow, light up red, that means that the HD cannot keep up with the streaing demands of DFD. A 3200 rpm hard drive will decrease the performance of your pieces. If you aren't using too many samples, you might even be able to load them directly into your ram. If you are using a lot of samples though, I think I would get a slightly faster hard drive.

Sean

[Petronome]

If you notice the DFD light, which is normally yellow, light up red, that means that the HD cannot keep up with the streaing demands of DFD. A 3200 rpm hard drive will decrease the performance of your pieces. If you aren't using too many samples, you might even be able to load them directly into your ram. If you are using a lot of samples though, I think I would get a slightly faster hard drive.

Sean

But didn't he say his libraries are on another, 7200rpm drive...? :confused:

[ToddK]

For best performance

Use 3 hard drives. One SATA 7200rpm for OS and programs.
One Raptor 10,000rpm for Samples
One SATA 7200rpm for Recording/Rendering audio files.

The Samples drive can be an SATA 7200rpm as well, but the Raptor
will give you and edge in disk streaming.

Hard drives are cheap now. Why torture yourself?
Go to pricewatch, and do it!! ;)
TK

[Petronome]

Btw, I have an old computer, which doesn't have SATA connections. It has typical two IDE connections, and I currently have 2 cd/dvd drives and 2 hard drives. The cd/dvd drives are on one IDE (one in master and another in slave) and the hard drives are on the other IDE. I was wondering is this a good configuration, or should they be in pairs so that in one IDE there is a cd drive and a hard drive, and same thing with the other IDE..? The one hard drive (40gb 7200rpm) has OS and programs, and the other HD has samples and audio.

Also, I might be able to get a third hard drive soon (for free), so should I throw away the cd drive (I would still have the another drive, a DVD-burner), and replace it with the third HD? Or would that do more bad than good, thinking about the IDEs and their bandwich? If I would have three HDs and one DVD-burner, how should I connect them with 2 IDE channels?