In a digital audio workstation, all of your recordings would be stored in a digital storage medium with hard drives as the most common storage. The stored digital audio is the digitized version of the analog musical performance. These are converted to digital audio by pulse code modulation(analog to digital conversion) at your audio interface hardware.
This tutorial will cover data storage implementations in digital audio workstation in detail. If you are completely new to setting up your recording studio, you might read this tutorial on the 13 important factors in computer audio recording.
Data Storage Technologies for DAW and their performance
First thing you need to know is to be familiar with common data storage technologies. There are essentially two common data storage medium available to computer. These are:
a.) HDD (Hard disk drive)
b.) SSD (Solid State Drives)
SSD and HDD
The main difference between the two is that a hard disk drive is a mechanical storage device consisting of circular storage media known as the platters (see the white disc on the above screenshot). It rotates or spins to store and access data. The spindle handling the rotation is driven by a motor.
Due to the physical nature of the hard disk drives, it does play a role in limiting the read and write speed of the data. The access time (the shorter the better) of the hard drive is commonly around 5ms to 10ms. This is defined as the time it takes for the hard drive to actually start transferring data (since it will still need to rotate before it can actually transfer bits).
Another performance factor of a hard disk drive is the seek time. This is the time it takes for the drive to read and write data (search/write data on the drive and transfer bits). Typical (average) seek time for desktop hard drives would be around 9ms.
Finally the last important performance factor would be rotational latency. This is the lag brought about the hard disk drive rotation. The faster the hard drive rotation, the lower the latency. For example HDD rated at 15,000 RPM would have a latency of around 2ms.
Solid State drives do not have any mechanical (or moving) parts. Instead, it consists of several integrated circuit/IC chips (the black rectangular chips you see on the above screenshot) to hold/store the data.
This would make the access time really fast; typically around 0.1ms. The seek time is also very fast because of the absence of moving parts. Typical seek time for SSD can be as fast 0.08ms. And there is no rotational latency for SSD. No mechanical parts would also mean that SSD are indeed super quiet.
Host Interface commonly used with Hard Disk Drive and SSD
Once you hook a data storage device to your computer, it needs to be interfaced with your motherboard and the rest of the components. This is where you need to consider the type of interface. The most common are as follows (assuming internal drive implementation):
1.) IDE/PATA – Integrated Drive Electronics
2.) SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment)
3.) SAS – Serial Attached SCSI
IDE is an old and slow technology and replaced by SATA. It’s now a question on deciding whether you want a SATA or a SAS interface.
SATA and SAS are modern host interface that are both really fast. SAS is often used in interfacing computer servers and a lot of mainstream motherboards do not support SAS by default. It is why you don’t find them often in most motherboard specifications for home desktop use. You can find SAS in motherboards designed for server applications.
This goes to say that you should be using SATA interfaces for your home studio computer. Take a look at the screenshot below for these interfaces:
SAS and SATA interface
RAID for DAW
RAID (Redundant array of independent disks) is a technology of combining multiple storage devices (such as multiple hard drives) in storing digital data either to enhance reliability (protect data integrity against failure) or efficiency (improve data access/speed).
There is a lot of RAID methods but below are some RAID methods that can be implemented with DAW:
1.) RAID 0
2.) RAID 1
The implementation for RAID 0 and RAID 1 method can be visualized below:
RAID 0 and RAID 1
As what you can see, both RAID 0 and RAID 1 uses a minimum of two hard drives for each setup. In RAID 0, two physical hard drives appear as one logical hard drive. The computer stores different data in both hard drives that can be accessed in parallel. Because of this parallel operation, it improves bandwidth and makes the storage process more efficient. The obvious downside of RAID 0 is where one hard drive goes down and it can take down your entire system without any means of immediate recovery other than the external backups.
RAID 1 is a mirror storage system. Two physical drives storing exactly the same information/data. But this would also appear as one logical drive to the system. The main obvious benefit would be increased reliability because of data redundancy (same data in both drives). If one drive fails, the data is still preserved on the other drive and the computer still continues to operate. You can then add a new drive without any loss of data in the event of storage drive failure.
So which storage setup is optimum for DAW? – Recommendation
Anyone knows that for a DAW to perform at its best it needs to be super-fast and quiet. So it appears that SSD is the most recommended data storage technologies for a modern DAW. It has very low access and seeks times that allow faster data transfer. The absence of mechanical parts makes the SSD quite during the operation.
If you are wondering why many DAW are still using hard disk drive, it’s because SSD drives are still very expensive as of 2012! The typical price of a 512GB SSD drive would be around $600. The equivalent hard disk drive of that size would only be around $70.
Therefore, it seems that the optimal setup for DAW storage would be using hard disk drive with SATA interface. Look for the fastest/big capacity SATA drive available in the market paired with modern motherboards that supports the latest SATA speeds. This setup has good cost to benefit ratio as of year 2012. This implies your building cost is low while you still have the benefit of having a fast data transfer and capacity that you need for audio recording.
If PC is well optimized (one dedicated hard drive for OS and one additional hard drive for recording/data, details here: “Windows XP/7 Audio Recording DAW Tweaks & Optimization Tips“) you can have a low cost DAW that is fast and reliable.
RAID 1 storage to enhance reliability/protection of recorded digital audio and sessions might be a very nice feature. But this is not strongly recommended for first time DAW builds as it means adding cost and complexity.
You can consider having a RAID 1 setup if you thoroughly understand on performing and managing RAID setups. This can be complicated for a DAW beginners converting their PC into a recording studio.
With or without RAID, it’s important to have an incremental backup solution like Norton Ghost to make periodic backups for your DAW project. You can read here for some back up tips here.
SSD for DAW as of 2012 is still not yet widely accepted. But there might be time in the future where this would become a new standard for digital audio storage replacing hard disk drives. Only when its price would be lower and the technology would now become very stable.
Content last updated on July 23, 2012