Audiophile HD fans ironically loud

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Hi awesome music software developers,

While I understand the desire to keep the end-user purchase price down, the 1.5TB drive that comes with the Audiofile PAK is the loudest thing in my studio. I am going to have to remote it out of the room somehow in order to use it.

My guess is those of us who go all-in on this are pretty serious about not only recording the best possible tracks, but also preserving the environment in which we mix them. Please be conscious about this on upcoming releases. I would happily pay more for it if I knew the HD it came on was whisper quiet.

Thanks for considering this,

stratavinsky

This is good info. I do not have that edition. However, if I did buy it, and noise was a big consideration, I would spring for a Solid State drive. Expensive, but if you read the reviews of the latest drives, they are blazing fast, make no noise, and are cool running. Theses drives have also had the bugs out, the reviews of the latest drives put them at 2.5 million hours. In other words, even if you moved 50 GB of data on them everyday, they would last between 15-25 years.

I looked at both Newegg and Tigerdirect webpages to get info.

Ed

Stravinsky, I have the audiophile external drive. I took the drive out of its case and mounted it inside the PC case (I was fortunate to have another SATA slot open). The drive is almost completely quiet like my other drives because the noise was from the fan in the external case, not the drive.

Ed, wow, an SSD drive for Real Tracks would be wonderful. However, there are over 1.2TB of files for the audiophile edition. I haven't seen a SSD as large as a TB in size yet, and if there were one, it would probably cost as much as the rest of my PC. Or my car. I can't wait until the capacity goes up and the cost comes down, though. If that happens, all drives will be SSD in short order.

Great tip Matt! I've never performed open heart surgery on an external drive before, but all-in-all it went pretty smooth. Navigating through the directory structure on the Audiophile HD is lightning fast now, too.

Hail SATA,

stratavinsky

Quote:

Hail SATA

I've gone to the same solution on the last 2 Audiophile drives. Frankly, PG Music could save themselves and me some money on future audiphile editions by offering an option of just shipping the bare SATA drive without the usb case. I'm just going to pull the drive out of the case, put it in the PC and throw the usb enclosure in the trash any way.

Quote:

I would happily pay more for it if I knew the HD it came on was whisper quiet.

Naw, not so much here. Considering that I don't need an external usb enclosure to make the drive work, I'd rather get cheaper and leave the enclosure out altogether.

Stavinsky - excellent. Glad it worked for you.

Keith, I was thinking the same thing. For the next major version, I will urge them to send me just the drive.

Another perfectly reasonable course -- if you need to keep it in the USB box -- is just to cut the wires on those noisy junk fans and throw them to hell.

Many high-grade enclosures no longer have fans, which have proved unnecessary for present-day drives. I have two fanless (in fact ventless) USB hard drives that don't get hot and have worked nicely for a couple years.

Larry, interesting idea. But you still have the performance limitation of USB rather than using the SATA connection directly.

About receiving only the drive, I just posted in the Wishlist. http://www.pgmusic.com/ubbthreads/showfl...ge=0#Post266911

Update. I just saw a 1 TB SSD drive at Newegg. It costs $3800, and even that would not be large enough capacity for the program with audiophile Real Tracks.

I was right. It costs well more than my whole PC, and almost as much as my car is worth now!

Someday...

Hey Matt, yeah, you nailed it on the head about cost/capacity issues. Let's hope they come WAY down in price soon.

I watched a few videos today on Youtube about SSD drives in General, learned a lot. I saw where they are best used in a Raid o array, up to 24 can be used. Access time as well as Write/Read times go through the roof as well.
I just bought a refurbished Dell D620 Laptop for $349. Intel Core duo 2. 60 gig drive. So I'm thinking about replacing it with a OCX or Micron 60 GB SSD drive. The drives are about $200, but the speed is supposed to be amazing. And more durable when I'm traveling, less heat, much longer life. If and when I do it, I'll report on how it's working in regards to using it with Digital Audio.

Ed

Matt, if you have that much of an 'in' with PGMusic, perhaps you can also push for them to update the enclosures for the hard drives (for all versions) to include eSata ports. That would make it much nicer for me anyway. USB on a 1.5tb drive is painfully slow. My computer case is full, so external or replacement for another drive are my only options.

Yes, I thought about that, too. I don't have any more 'in' than anyone else, and you should post that good idea on the Wishlist. Having a choice of preferred drive type would be nice.

Quote:

Update. I just saw a 1 TB SSD drive at Newegg. It costs $3800, and even that would not be large enough capacity for the program with audiophile Real Tracks.

I was right. It costs well more than my whole PC, and almost as much as my car is worth now!

Someday...

Hi Matt,
There are a couple of 2TB raid SSD drives that are mounted on PCIe cards and which can achieve throughput many times faster than SATA but these are even more prohibitively expensive than the one you quoted. Given that they are basically built around silicon, Moores Law should mean that they will come down in price pretty rapidly over the next 3 or 4 years so to the point where we could maybe afford them as our dedicated BIAB server drives.

I have previously suggested to PG that they should consider distributing the audiophile version in the 'Lossless WMA' format. This will only give around a 2 to 1 compression ratio but right now that would mean that we could fit the audiophile version on to 600GB instead of 1.2 terabytes. If they did this then maybe BIAB could meet SSD drives a year or two sooner down the price performance curve. (Which would be nice!)

For people who are happy with the WMA version of realtracks an SSD may be an affordable option right now - you can pick up a Samsung 256GB SSD for around £500 in the UK (The way the exchange rate is going that will probably translate to $500 pretty soon!). This is still not pocket money cheap but you get a lot of bang for your buck.

Meanwhile I am thinking about installing a Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB drive as my internal BIAB drive. This is a 7,200 RPM drive which uses clever technology to deliver performance which beats even the 10,000RPM Velociraptor drives. This costs around £200. Together with the faster realtrack generation times in BIAB 2010 this should give awesome (if not quite SSD) performance.

Regards, Aubrey

Fascinating being on the cutting edge. Let us know how it works out.

Before buying a SSD here's a link to some interesting information about these little beasties. There seems to be two different grades and the consumer grade has some undesirable artifacts as per this quote:

"The consumer grade drives (the Adaptec, Apricorn, Dot Hill and Ritek systems) showed dramatic variations in response times (latency) under sustained write conditions, which some vendors are calling the 'write cliff'."

The link to the article is here:

http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/CDN/News.asp?id=57255

For us folks that use BIAB on laptops the USB drive is a necessity but the fans on the unit enclosure supplied are pretty loud and distracting. If you have "golden ears" the whine of the drive can still be pretty annoying even without the fans. (I disconnected mine and have been monitoring the heat but there have been no issues or heat generation of any significance so far.)

I have ordered a new HDD enclosure to try out and will report here if it makes a significant difference. I hope so!

Otherwise, I can't say enough good things about the new BIAB audiophile version. I've waited for many years for something like this and feel it is absolutely outstanding. Highly recommended.