[LAU] Ardour Error: Hard disk too slow

[arisstotle.54695488 at bloglines.com]

--- Matthias =?iso-8859-1?q?Sch=F6nborn?= <mbs1303 at gmx.de wrote:
Hi list,

> 
> Lately I've got some issues with ardour repeatedly giving an error
message 
> saying that ardour wasn't able to continue playback because the
disk was too 
> slow and ardour couldn't fetch the data. How can this be
fixed?
> 
> I'm using Kubuntu Feisty with a low latency kernel, and in my
setup I run 
> Jack, QSynth, Hydrogen, Rosegarden, and Ardour - is the load
just too heavy 
> (I can hardly imagine)? Ah, and I'm using an external M-Audio
Interface if 
> that's of any importance.
> 
> Regards,
> Matthias
>
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> 

A message like this really does mean that your hard disk can't keep
up with the demand for data. The cause of this however can come from several
sources. Since you are running several programs at once, most likely synced
together through the Jack transport, this means that they are probably all
trying to access data from the drive(s) at the same time, and as you know,
audio can be rather dense when uncompressed. So the solution? It is often
recommended to have a separate disk for recording audio and whatnot to, that
way, when linux needs to read info for running a program it wont interfere
with the audio data access on another disk. Of course faster sata/serial disk
drives will help as well.