Upgrading is becoming a regular task for many PC owners. Martin Walker gets stuck in once again, looking at hard drives, memory expansions, and faster processors.
Anyone who has been following my contributions to the PC Musician section, and in particular 'Bottleneck Blues' in the August issue, will already know that the speed of your hard drive is what primarily determines how many tracks can be played by a HD recording system. My hard drive (Quantum TM 1Gb) is rather slow, so I thought it was about time I dug into my piggy bank again. The Maxtor Diamond Max range of drives is the darling of the PC magazines at the moment, and regularly near the top of many EIDE speed polls. However, every time I mention a specific model, it seems to be superseded, so please check. There are several sizes in the range, but the two most popular are the 2.5Gb version (model 82560A4), which can currently be bought for £150 including VAT and delivery, and, if you want more space, a juicy 5.1Gb version available at £260 (model 85120A8). Soundscape tested the 5.1Gb version in their HD recording system, and it was the fastest unit they have seen to date. I ordered a bare 2.5Gb drive, rather than a kit, so the box arrived containing only the drive, a leaflet, and an invoice.
Once I opened up my PC, I saw that the ribbon cable attached to my current drive had no extra connectors along its length for adding additional drives. Luckily, since I intended to completely replace the existing Quantum drive, rather than run both drives side by side, I only needed to get them both running together temporarily, to run the DriveCopy software that I mentioned last month. Thankfully, I noticed that the cable connecting my CD‑ROM drive to the rest of the system had the same number of pins, so I was able to use this to get both drives up and running, by connecting up the new one as Primary Master, and the old one as Secondary Master. Following the procedure I explained last month in 'Installing A New PC Hard Drive', I installed the new drive (it took about half an hour), used DriveCopy to copy across the entire contents of my old drive (another half an hour), and then removed the Quantum altogether. It was a bit nerve‑wracking rebooting for the first time, but DriveCopy had worked perfectly, and the new drive simply carried on from the old. The only applications that needed re‑installing were Sound Forge, Steinberg's WaveLab and Cakewalk Pro Audio — I suspect that DirectX plug‑ins were the common cause of this. If you ever download upgrades over the Internet, this is a reminder that it is worth hanging on to them: in the event of a re‑install, you will need the same update files again.
With any drive over 2Gb, partitioning must be carried out, otherwise your drive will simply appear as a 2Gb device, the rest being ignored by Windows 95. Choosing the size of partitions requires a little thought, but luckily I have Partition Magic, which makes adjustments easy, even when there is existing data stored on the drive (see /www.soundonsound.com/sos/1997_ar... issue for my review of this wonderful utility). Partitions from 256‑511Mb use 8k clusters, those from 512‑1023Mb use 16k, and from 1‑2Gb they use 32k. To maximise hard disk space, I decided to adjust the C: partition size of the new drive to 1018Mb. This just scrapes in under the top limit for a 16k cluster size, and so there is a lot less wasted space with all the tiny files on this partition (where all the applications live). DriveCopy had left this partition as 1.2Gb (32k clusters), and with 400Mb of existing data, the reduction to a 1018Mb partition with 16k clusters immediately gained me 67Mb of extra space. The remainder of the drive (about 1.4Gb) I left as a D: drive, since although this uses 32k clusters, the wastage is likely to be much less, as I will use this for stereo mastering, and a small amount of HD recording. This involves relatively few files, which also tend to be much larger, so storage efficiency should be much higher.
The performance of the new drive was every bit as good as I expected. Overall benchmark tests showed a system improvement of about 5% (you would get a similar overall improvement upgrading from a 166 to a 200MHz processor), but running the HD benchmark test in Nuts & Bolts showed that whereas my old Quantum TM had a data transfer rate of 5.7Mb/second (and average seek time of 10.5ms), the Maxtor Diamond Max managed 6.8Mb/second (and 9.5ms). This is a 20% improvement, and the Cubase performance test confirmed this figure — the time taken by the hard drive on my Pentium 166MMX to play back a single stereo audio track dropped from 120ms to 99ms. As we saw in 'Bottleneck Blues' in the August issue, HD recording relies heavily on the hard drive itself, so this is effectively a 20% improvement in HD recording speed, which should leave significantly more time for the processor to be able to provide more EQ and FX now that the PC version of Cubase VST has finally appeared! You can contact Maxtor on 01483 747356, and visit their web site at www.maxtor.com.
Power To The People
Talking of processor power, it seems that many people are now thoroughly confused by the proliferation of new processors appearing on the market. Since the dreadful publicity associated with the launch of Intel's MMX range just after Christmas, only a tiny amount of software has actually appeared that specifically takes advantage of its special features, and sales of MMX processors have not been quite as frantic as Intel might have liked. Now that both AMD and Cyrix have released 'MMX bashers' in the shape of their K6 and MX series, Intel have attempted to encourage more people to upgrade to MMX by dropping some processors altogether, and slashing the prices of others. Entry level is now the Pentium 166MMX (the standard 133MHz, 150MHz and166MHz have been axed). So, if you were thinking of upgrading, you may get a pleasant surprise when you enquire about price, with the 166MMX now hovering at about the £110 mark, and the 200MMX at £190.
For musicians, this is great news, since it still seems that most music software works better with the Intel Pentium range. Steinberg claim that an MMX processor will give a 10‑15% performance improvement with their new Cubase VST 3.5 PC (see 'In the Pipeline'), and Seer Systems have also measured the performance of their Reality software synthesizer with a range of processors. Compared with the speed using a standard (non‑MMX) Pentium 200MHz, the AMD K6 233MHz performed at only 93%, and the Cyrix MMX200 at 46%! Switching from the standard Pentium 200MHz to the MMX version produced a further 33% improvement.
Thanks For The Memory
As always, the trend for all computers is to be faster and bigger, and thankfully memory prices are lower than ever. However, with more and more applications providing EQ, effects, and even physical modelling synthesis in real time, the minimum requirements for RAM are always on the increase. One problem to watch out for is that many PC motherboards only have four SIMM sockets for memory, and since these are used in pairs, you only get one chance to upgrade before you run out of sockets. If you have a PC with 16Mb installed, and are thinking of expanding your memory, it is well worth considering an additional 32Mb (a pair of 16Mb SIMMs), to provide a total of 48Mb, rather than adding a pair of 8Mb SIMMs for a total of 32Mb. The reason? Both Cubase VST 3.5 PC and the Reality software synthesizer require a minimum of 24Mb RAM, and recommend 32Mb or more. I suspect that 48Mb or 64Mb will be commonplace by next year, and the only way for someone with a total of four 8Mb SIMMs to expand is to remove an existing pair and replace them with something bigger. Go for bigger ones now — 60ns EDO RAM can currently be bought for about £42 for 16Mb SIMMs (only £84 to add a total of 32Mb).
If you want to take advantage of the latest software developments, computer ownership is starting to resemble those speciality acts that spin plates balanced on poles — just as you replace or supplement one part of your system to give it a boost, another component starts to become a bit shaky.
The New Waves
Waves have now released yet another update to their excellent Native Power Pack, for both the PC and Mac. The good news is that the new version 2.3 update is completely free to owners of previous versions, and can be downloaded from the Waves web site (www.waves.com), although the PC version is a hefty 2.6Mb. Apart from the inevitable unspecified bug fixes, there are several new features, including new presets for the TrueVerb, C1 compressor and L1 Ultramaximizer, as well as integrated Save, Load and Delete options for user presets. In the list of DirectX plug‑ins, the S1 Stereo Imager now appears in an additional incarnation without its normal 'shuffler' (which widens stereo width at bass frequencies). This provides a way to use most of the useful features of the full S1, but with about 20% less processor overhead. The help files themselves are much improved, which is about time, considering that no manual was ever supplied.
The fixed factory presets now also appear in the Load options. WaveLab owners never previously saw these factory presets at all, so this will be a lot of help to them, but Sound Forge has always separately provided access to these, so this means that there's now the minor cosmetic irritation of several duplicated buttons, such as Save and Help. It seems that the main reason for the huge jump in version number, from 1.3 to 2.3, is the possibility of full automation for every control in the Mac TDM bundle, but at the moment this doesn't seem to apply to the PC version. The other big advantage for Mac owners is access to freely downloadable Setup Libraries, which feature a huge number of presets, particularly for the Q10 paragraphic EQ. These are not currently available to PC owners, but I'll let you know of any further developments.
In The Pipeline
Good news this month for anyone waiting patiently for further ways to add EQ and effects in real time from their favourite sequencing package. Although Cakewalk Pro Audio 6 pipped the others to the post (/www.soundonsound.com/sos/1997_ar...), Steinberg's Cubase VST 3.5 PC should be actively shipping by the time you read this (Janet Harniman‑Cook reviews the first official copy, received by carrier pigeon, on page 216 of this very issue). The new version 3.0 of Emagic's Logic Audio is also now promised a mid‑October release, after its original September release was postponed, following a last‑minute discovery of a way to significantly improve performance. I suspect that many people are going to be upgrading their processors to take advantage of all this potential.
As reported in this month's news pages, the Acoustics Modeler (sic) plug‑in from Sonic Foundry has arrived, and looks most intriguing. Rather than providing a general reverb algorithm, this records the actual acoustics of real buildings, and then allows you to map them onto your own music. Not only is there a host of acoustics on the CD‑ROM, but Sonic Foundry also provide the means for you to record your own.