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Technical information on computer specs for Hauptwerk
Part 6: disk drives
Since Hauptwerk stores all audio data in memory, rather than streaming audio samples from hard-disk, provided that sufficient memory is installed in a computer, the type and speed of its hard-disks should have no significant effect on Hauptwerk's real-time audio performance (polyphony).
Principally, the speed of the disks determines the time taken to load a sample set into memory. Other operations involving files are also affected to a lesser degree, such as:
- Loading and saving registration combination banks.
- Loading different temperaments.
- Recording the audio output from Hauptwerk.
If you use Hauptwerk with a sequencer, then the speed of the disks may affect the performance of the sequencer, which may in turn affect the performance of Hauptwerk to some degree.
If you consider loading times to be important, then we recommend you use the fastest disks available for your hardware, such as 7,200 or 10,000 RPM drives with 16 MB or more of cache memory. Currently we would recommend SATA drives, which are supported by the vast majority of modern computers, and are generally available and reasonably priced.
Certain configurations of RAID disk arrays can also give very high disk performance, although some of the RAID controllers included on PC motherboards do not perform especially well, and additional dedicated RAID controller cards might be required for best performance. RAID 1 or RAID 5 arrays are recommended for both security and speed. (RAID 0 arrays are fast, but give the least data security since all data would be lost if any one disk failed. RAID 0+1 and 1+0 give good data security and performance but require at least four hard drives.) For live installation in an environment where fault-tolerance is critical, such as for public performance, two or more matching disks in a RAID 1 array are recommended.
On Apple Macs that support multiple disk drives, such as the Mac Pro range, Mac OS X includes a tool called Disk Utility which can be used to set up a software-based RAID array. A (software) RAID 1 array on a Mac Pro gives very good performance.
Hauptwerk requires a large amount of disk space to allow for installation of sample sets, and its cached sample set data. The cached data are used to speed up loading of sample sets, and occupy very approximately an additional two-thirds of the amount of disk space occupied by the raw sample set data alone. Hence almost twice as much disk space is required as that for the raw sample set data alone. In general, we would recommend allowing 40-200 GB of disk space if you intend to use a number of different sample sets.
We would recommend choosing disks that have at least a three year warranty and good reliability, such as the Seagate Barracuda SATA drives. The disks available from Apple for the Apple Macs are perfectly adequate.
A pair of good-quality high-capacity 7,200 RPM SATA drives (such as the Seagate Barracuda range) in a RAID 1 array used with a good-quality motherboard that has a good-quality onboard RAID controller should provide excellent performance and fault-tolerance at a reasonable cost.
If you are installing Apple Mac OS X from scratch (not usually required), we recommend using the default file system during installation, and avoiding the 'case sensitive' file system (a custom installation option) since some Hauptwerk sample sets may not be compatible with it. On Windows PCs we strongly recommend using the NTFS file system (the default for Windows XP and Vista) instead of the older FAT32. FAT32 does not support files larger than 4 GB, which can cause problems for some very large sample sets.
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