For all those worried about the speed of their HD

[JAYDMF]

Originally Posted by Stagesound

No arguements there! (sureno will be so disappointed). Roll on the all-in-one processor-with-built-in-500Gb-solid-state-hard-drive-and-Thorrn-Micro-Technologies-corona-wind-cooling system! (in a box the size of a cigarette packet, apart from the XLR I/O connectors)

Just out of interest, my best performing drive is the 500Gb, which is eSATA. Being eSATA, it has a reasonably long connecting cable, which means I can shove it well out of the way, so noise is not a problem. It's in a rather nice aluminium case, which acts as a heat sink, so the tiny little fan in the case is doing no work at all. This also means I'm not producing any additional heat inside the PC. Perhaps getting the drives outside of the PC is a short term improvement until the solid-state ones drop to affordable levels?

Another geeky question - do you have anti-virus software on your machine? If so, do you switch it off when you're doing audio work? Obviously it will affect performance (as it does on every application!), but just wondering what other people's strategy is - keep it on and take the risks, or knock it off to remove the performance hit?

Yeah external chasis are a good solution, i have an icy box in mine and this works treat too as like you say its one big alu sink with a tiny lil 40mm fan on the front and thats the coolest drive out of all of mine (about 30 at load) that too is on e-sata which seems be a very efficient interface.

I do have AVG free on my audio machine but it is not connected to the net so the only purpose for AVG is to scan samples and other bits and bobs that have come from any other machine. AVG doesnt run in real time so doesnt cause me any jip but i usually close everything i dont need when running cubase just to stop anything causing any blips if they spaz out.