Can you switch internal hard drives?

[thecool1]

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

[KenB]

Hi and welcome to ExTS

 

I wrote a tutorial re. cloning a drive that may be the answer.

Basically you can copy the image of your hard drive exactly - Operating System / Files / Folders .......everything and transfer it to the new disk.

You will need an external hard drive to do this. This must have a capacity equal or bigger than the stored data on the drive to be copied.

 

You could consider a solid state drive as your Primary Drive. The Read/Write speeds are considerably faster than a SATA 7200r/m

The only down side is the drives are about 3 or 4 times the price.

 

How to create an image of your Hard Drive

http://kenspchelp.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=190

[thecool1]

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.

[KenB]

You are welcome.

Let us know how you get on.

 

The process requires some time - especially transferring the image to the second drive.

[Plastic Nev]

Hi, Thanks so far for info regarding the hard drive, could you give us some more information about the rest of your computer, specifically is it a 32bit or 64bit system, how much RAM you have installed, and also the CPU itself and how many cores it has. I also wonder if you have a PCI or PCIE sound card installed.

I am a little worried that your real reason for problems may be not enough RAM installed rather than hard drive speeds.

Ableton though I have heard of it, have not yet used it, but as is the case with some of these applications, to run well they need a decent amount of RAM.

 

Nev.

[KenB]

Nev has made a valid point.

The amount of free space on your hard drive can also be a factor.

 

It may be worthwhile looking into this a bit further before you spend the time imaging your drive.

Mind you - having a backup that you can pop in if the other fails is not a bad idea either - but it may not solve your problem.

[Plastic Nev]

I was a little short of time the other day, but have now looked into this a little more. Ableton Live is as you will know a full sequencing program, capable of quite a high level amount of music making.

The system requirements,taken from their website=

Quote=

Windows: 2 GHz Pentium® 4 or Celeron® compatible CPU or faster (multicore CPU recommended), 2 GB RAM (4 GB recommended on Windows Vista and Windows 7), Windows XP (home or Pro), Windows Vista or Windows 7, sound card (ASIO driver support recommended), DVD-ROM drive, QuickTime recommended

The installation size of the Essential Instrument Collection 2 is 15 GB.

 

They say a minimum spec processor of 2GHz I would be happier with higher and up to 3GHz. They also recommend multi core, I would be happy with at least a quad core.

Minimum of 2GB RAM, recommending 4GB, again, if the motherboard will take it and the CPU and OS is 64bit, then 6GB is where I would be looking. I also would definitely be looking to install a PCIE sound card especially if using any sort of MIDI keyboard, otherwise latency will be a real problem.

In actual fact, the speed of the hard drive should not be a part of the equation at all, unless because of a low figure in RAM, the operating system is being forced to utilise too much page file, or virtual memory. Not a good thing when you don't want any latency, even a very fast drive such as a solid state one, will not make up for not having enough RAM.

It is within the memory or RAM, that Windows will be working with the program, not off the disk.

 

Nev.

[thecool1]

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?

[KenB]

AMD 645 quad core CPU overclocked to 3.8ghz, I have 8GB of RAM and my OS is Win 7 64bit,

Nothing wrong with your specs.

So much so - I doubt that a move to a faster HDD would make a difference.

I cannot understand why the program crashes - it cannot be due to the data transfer rate of the drive.

 

 

You may find this interesting:

A Solid State drive would be even better.

 

 

 

Ableton has a support site.

Crashing has been noted before.

http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=111925

[Plastic Nev]

Totally agree with Ken here, I would now be suspecting a problem with Ableton. There just maybe some incompatibility problem with something else that may be running in the background, and there are many things that do so, but antivirus software can sometimes be a problem with other software. Depends on which you are using, though I have seen clashes with AVG or Norton, especially older versions of Norton.

Also similar with some firewall software too. A good idea to check out the Ableton site first and see if there are any similarities and solutions to your problem.

An option you may not favour perhaps would be to look for other software capable of doing what you need as well and try using that instead of the Ableton. There are quite a lot of similar sequencers available with a lot quite able to do most if not all the Ableton can do.

If interested in trying others, either as freeware, or shareware with the option to later buy the upgrade, there is a tremendous list of software available here=

 

http://www.hitsquad.com/smm/

 

Have a look at MIDI sequencers, Production suite, and many more. You will find Ableton live there as well as Cubase and others.

 

Nev.

[KenB]

There are now 3 posts to read :)

 

Nev may be on to something with AV / Firewall.

Try disabling both and running the software.

 

Don't forget to enable them again.