[LAU] Best file system for audio?

Jörn Nettingsmeier nettings at folkwang-hochschule.de
Wed Jun 29 06:16:36 UTC 2011


On 06/29/2011 08:02 AM, Arnold Krille wrote:

> 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.

i found that increasing ardour's disk buffer size from 5 seconds to 
something like 45 seconds helps a lot. basically, you throw ram at the 
problem :) since i did that, i've never seen the dreaded "disk couldn't 
keep up with ardour" message again.
you will want to undo this during editing, though, or else ardour will 
try to fill those buffers before playing, which takes time.

iiuc ardour3 allows you to set different read and write buffers, which 
eliminates the need to change settings. but i haven't tested that in 
production yet.

> 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.

not sure about ssd - i think that's wasteful given the limited number of 
r/w cycles you get from those things. but raid1 is pretty much a must 
for what i do. i can't imagine discussing accidental data loss due to 
single drive failure with a customer...
especially not if it's a choir and orchestra whose combined salary would 
easily buy you a multi-TB RAID6 per hour.

everything goes to raid1 when i do recording jobs, and before the 
machine is moved, i make a backup copy to an external disk that is 
looked after very, very well.


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