[LAU] Ardour Error: Hard disk too slow

[Matthias Schönborn]

> 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.

Hm... that sounds a little bit disappointing, especially as I found out that 
theres an SATA- disk in my laptop (Samsung X20). sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda 
results in:

 Timing cached reads:   1592 MB in  2.00 seconds = 795.96 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   96 MB in  3.06 seconds =  31.40 MB/sec

Shouldn't that be fast enough?

Are there any people here who are recording to systemdisks with no problems?

As a workaround, I'm recording the Hydrogen track in Ardour, so that I can 
switch Hydrogen of. I'm not very happy with it, though.