nTrack and Other Audio on Separate Drive
I think I would like to have all my Audio Programs Ntrack,GigaStudio,WaveLab,VSC,T racks etc. on a separate drive which also contains WinXP Pro with all updates.
This drive would be selectable to Boot using OSL 2000 Boot Manager.
The other drives would have my standard Computer programs such as Word,Adobe,Printshop and of course its own copy of WinXP Pro to boot when this drive is selected.
So the question is Should all my audio go on the Maxtor 160 Firewire or one of 2 SATA 200 gb Drives
Does this make sense? My PC is 2.8 gH, 1 Gb Corsair matched Ram
I’s suggest the OS and applications like n-Tracks to go one one physical drive and all the data files (songs, waves, etc) go on the other physical drive. Other than that use the drive with the fastest steady state throughput for the data. The is best for recording and playback of many tracks at once. That will be the bottleneck in most cases. Also, keep in mind that raw specs of the drive won’t do it. Hard drive features must be supported by the OS and in some cases turned on manually. Info on that can be found on OS tweaking website (lots of them - no one has all the answers).
This doesn’t address your question though. I don’t know enough about SATA or Firewire to answer that.
It is good to have dual boot (one stripped down for DAW), but similar results can be had using hardware profiles and multiple user accounts…theoredically that is. 
I have used external USB 2.0 drives successfully with up to 12 tracks (44.1 kHz., 24-bit) but have not yet tried to push beyond that so I don’t know the limit. I suspect that an internal drive will be able to handle more tracks without problems than an external drive will but I don’t know for certain. I have two internal 36G Western Digital Raptor SATA drives that I use when I am concerned about performance and I am pretty sure they will handle more simultaneous tracks than an external drive will but for moderate size projects external drives work fine.
One of the bands I record has their own drive which they bring to my studio to track on then take home to mix on (N-track in both locations). This is really convenient and lets me not have to worry about clearing space for their projects.
Jim
Hi, I have a number of hard drives in caddies each with windows on them. I plug them in one at a time depending on which programme I want to run.The dedicated N-track one will run more than twice the number of tracks than the “general” one loaded up with word internet stuff etc. Not sure about sata and firewire.
Nick