thecool1

Hi all, I have a question. I was wondering if anyone can take me by the hand and explain the best way I should go out setting up both a Solid State Drive and Hard Disk Drive in one system. I have researched about how to optimize Windows 7 for a SSD i.e switiching to AHCI mode, disabling indexing and superfetching etc. But If I do this will it effect my mechanical HDD Drives performance? Also is it advisable to run a HDD in AHCI mode anyway? If someone could give me a step by step guide that would be much appreciated. (sorry for sounding like I dont know a thing, its just I bought a SSD thinking it would be fairly straight forward to install with a HDD, but for my peace of mind I want a second opinion from an expert before I start taking my computer apart.) Thanks to anyone who takes the time out to help me. Windows 7 64 bit 8GB DDR3 Ram AMD Athlon 645 3.8GHZ (Overclocked) Geforce GTX 460 (I will post the specific details of my motherboard and chipsets on a later thread, I cant remember them now)

Hi guys, sorry for late reply, work is destroying me. Thanks again for taking the time out to help me btw. The only real reason why I think its my hard drive is because my system is fairly good, apart from my master drive, which is still "OK" but definiatly not up for extreme audio editing. I have an AMD 645 quad core CPU overclocked to 3.8ghz, I have 8GB of RAM and my OS is Win 7 64bit, my sound card/interface is a USB Roland Cakewalk UG-A1, I am using an ASIOforall driver. I have looked into PCI vs USB soundcard/Interface's and the difference seems minor, as long as your drivers are up to date all should be good. I just dont know what to do! Its just I'v been signed by a small record label in Amsterdam and all thats holding my back is this stupid problem with crashing, real creativity killer. I'm tempted to just straight replace my master drive with a solid state and re-install windows and all other software. Does anyone know of anything else I can do to optimize my PC for heavy audio production?

Thank you very much for the quick response KenB. It seems like you have answered my prayers, as soon as i finish work I will get on following the steps in your tutorial, if there are any other problems I'l let you know. Thanks again for the rapid response.

I will just explain my situation. I built my PC in mind for music production and gaming, all was going well untill working heavily within Ableton live 8. Ableton kept on crashing, sometimes not so bad, but most of the time has really epic crashes. I mean the computer becomes unresponsive and I see artifacts all over the screen, I have to restart everytime to take hold of the system. I thought this was because my PC was not optimized for music production, after watching several tutorials I optimized, ie turning of wireless, adjusting performance so the CPU favored background services etc...the problem still continued. I have isolated it down to my internal hard drive, which I bought ignorantly assuming it was 7200 rpm or better, it is not, it is 5400 rpm. Which is not ideal for music production as you need a fair bit of scratch disk space and fast speeds so audio can be played back in real time without glitching. Basicaly my hard drive cannot deal with the amount of data sent to it in real time and as a result crashes my system, I have my Operating System installed on this hard drive, and all my other programmes. My question is this. Can you switch internal hard drives so I keep all my old data and programmes and move it to another better hard drive (without having to re install windows). I have two internal drives, the **** one with my OS and software on, and another one that is 7200 rpm. I would like to move everything too the 7200 rpm one so that it is the master drive, and my other **** TB drive can be used for just storing movies and samples or whatever. Currantly both are installed in my system, the **** hard drive is the master. Thank you to anyone taking the time out to help me. Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit AMD Athlon II quad core 645 3.8ghz (overclocked) RAM - 8GB Nvidea GTX 460 880w Power Sup