[LAU] Ext2 or Ext3 for Audio?

[Kevin Cosgrove]

On 25 June 2007 at 22:17, David Haggett <david at haggett.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> Just ordered a 320G sata hard disk to replace my increasingly
> noisy 40G IDE disk (which is currently formatted with
> ReiserFS).  I think I've read (here) that ReiserFS isn't the
> best filesystem for audio work, but I would like to retain
> journaling if possible.
>
> Does ext3 play nice with an RT kernel, or is it the journaling
> that causes the problems for ReiserFS
>
> Also should I plan to convert existing partitions on another
> disk (my music library) to ext3, or is it only the partitions
> actively used in audio work that matter?
> 
> Many thanks in advance.

I can't answer your question with certainty or with much data
to back up my viewpoint.  All I can say is that I've been doing
audio work for a couple of years now on a 2GHz Celeron machine
with 1GB of RAM and 2 ext3 partitions (/ and /home) on my ATA100
drive.  My audio data is in /home and my programs are for the
most part in /. I've had really good luck.  I've only seen one
case where the disk couldn't keep up, and that was when I was
trying to play 70 tracks of 16-bit 44.1kHz data simultaneously.
Once enough of the data was cached, then ardour actually *did*
play all that.  But, it took 3-5 false starts to get enough
cached.

There are probably better ways to achieve more performance.
But, things work for me.

Good luck...


--
Kevin
"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its
continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the
computer hardware industry...", Henry Petroski [can you say "Windows"?]