Subject:Optimising a Laptop HD??

Posted by: buckaroo

Date:3/24/2006 7:36:48 AM

Whats the best way to optimize the 5400rpm HD on a laptop for Audio Recording?

I have a reasonable 1.7Ghz Laptop with 512mb which i use in conjunction with a Mac, as i love Soundforge for recording and editing..

What i want to do is record audio files/samples in Soundforge 8.0 and "zip" them across to my Mac (dont have editor for mac) so i can use my edited and recorded sounds within Logic etc..

However i only have a 5400rpm drive (i think its 5400rpm?) on my laptop, i occasionally get stutters/clicks playing back audio in Sforge, but i know thats just the PC struggling, and know it will be fine once burnt to CDR or rendered/saved..

BUT recording Audio straight into the Laptop creates clicks/jumps which obviously i cant do anything about once its in the computer as it was recorded like that... I dont really want to buy yet another HD (external FW) for it as im only using it for basics... So is there anyway i can optimise the drive so recording isnt so jumpy?

Do i tick (or untick) in Drive properties..

"Allow indexing Service to index for fast file searching".... or "Compress drive to save disk space"?

Or any other tweaks ?

Thanks in advance..

Subject:RE: Optimising a Laptop HD??

Reply by: JohnnyRoy

Date:3/24/2006 8:03:08 AM

Turning off the indexing service or any other service that may occasionally wake up and try and access the hard drive while you are recording is a good start. Never use compress space because that adds additional overhead to uncompress it when accessed. Make sure the drive is using DMA mode.

Probably the biggest and most common advice is to defragment your hard drive so that all the free space is in one area. You might also want to partition into two logical drives it to keep fragmentation down to a minimum on your recording partition.

Finally, make sure the Windows swap file is a fixed size so that Windows doesn’t try and resize it as you are recording. Go to System Properties and click the Advanced tab. Then push the Performance Settings button, select the Advanced tab and under Virtual Memory press the Change button. Make sure Custom size is selected and that the min and max are exactly the same!

That’s about the best you can do for a single drive system. Don’t assume your hard drive is 5200 RPM. Many laptops are only 4800 RPM :(.

~jr