[LAU] SSD for audio

[Brent Busby]

On Tue, 2 Nov 2010, Joe Hartley wrote:

> On Tue, 2 Nov 2010 12:48:19 -0400
> Allan Wind <allan_wind at lifeintegrity.com> wrote:
>
>> On 2010-11-02T16:44:31, Harry Van Haaren wrote:
>>> There are RAM-SSD modules available. Plugs in via SATA 300 or PCI or
>>> something IIRC...
>>> That'd be awesome for anything that needs fast IO & sustained writing.
>>>
>>> If I remember the company Ill post here, Cheers, -Harry
>>
>> Fusion-io?
>
> I am currently working in QA for a company that makes storage systems 
> (NAS/SAN appliances), and had a chance to work with some of the 
> FusionIO products.  Holy guacamole, they are blazingly fast!  They're 
> pricey, though, since that kind of speed comes at a premium.
>
> I've also had the chance to work with a number of different SSDs, and 
> have just purchased one to install into my studio machine.  My 
> experiences at work lead me to believe that the SSDs now available are 
> reliable and fast enough for audio work.

Something that's been occuring to me today:

Linux has ramdisk support, though it's seldom used or talked about as 
much as ramdisks used to be on the Amiga platform long ago...

I can hardly imagine an Ardour project bigger than 512MB.  A 1GB project 
would be humongous...

These days you can have 8, 16, 24...even more...gigabytes of real 
memory...

What's really stopping anyone from having an Ardour project in ram, and 
bypassing the whole sata/scsi subsystem completely, saving the kernel a 
ton of i/o, and making *lots* of simulateous tracks possible?

-- 
+ Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin	 +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago	 +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky