[LAU] Best file system for audio?

Arnold Krille arnold at arnoldarts.de
Wed Jun 29 06:02:09 UTC 2011


On Wednesday 29 June 2011 01:40:24 Gabriel M. Beddingfield wrote:
> On Monday, June 27, 2011 05:47:13 pm S. Massy wrote:
> > I know this topic comes up now and again. I'm about to
> > create a partition for audio work and am wondering
> > whether any new consensus has been reached over which is
> > the best file system format for the job. What are you,
> > fellows using?
> 
> Something like this should do you good:
> 
>   - For hard disk recording... use a NON-journaling
>     file system like ext2.  (E.g. mounted as
>     /tmp or something.)  This removes the overhead
>     of updating the journal for each transaction
>     to the disk.  If you have a power failure during
>     a recording, you're pretty fsck'd no matter which
>     way you go... so the journal won't help you.

I don't believe the journal takes that much overhead. What makes recording 
more difficult is that with one ardour-session and several channels, you are 
writing several files at once. So you want a disk with fast seek-time and/or 
high latencies set in jack/ardour. And if you want to optimize the disk, you 
will take a serious look at ssd for the recording of the current session and 
hold the archive on a nas with raid.
If you are just recording (no playback of existing material) you can further 
optimize by using an app that records your several channels into one file 
(which is written sequentially) like timemachine and the likes.

Wether you use ext[234], xfs or anything else doesn't matter. All current 
filesystems can be resized at least offline, so putting your partitions in a lvm 
is a good idea even if you are on a laptop.

>   - For everything else... use a stable, journaling
>     filesystem.  ext4 is very nice, as is ext3.
>     But things like xfs, reiserfs, jfs, etc... these
>     are all good choices.

'reiserfs' and 'stable' in the same sentence:-/
Well, there are two types of people regarding reiserfs, those who love it and 
those who lost data using reiserfs...

Have fun,

Arnold
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