[LAU] One or two HD's for audio work

[Len Ovens]

On Thu, April 4, 2013 3:09 pm, Grekim Jennings wrote:
> Hi,
> What's the latest consensus?   Is it recommended to have a separate
> drive for audio on a Linux system?  Separate partition?  I'm just
> wondering about performance, not practical issues like moving audio
> around or reinstalling the system, etc.  As we know there are Mac/PC
> DAW's that need things separate.  Thanks.

I have not had any issues with using a DAW on one disk/partition. Having
said that, I am not sure I have ever gotten to the point that I have
written enough that the buffers _had_ to be cleared to make more room in
memory. I have 2.5G of ram, but most audio uses are in around 1G for the
apps... so 10M/minute/2channels or so. 5minutes at 16 channels is still
less than 500meg. So there is still 1g unused or so. (I was thinking
16bit, but I guess we are doing 32 bit, so maybe double that)

What will mess up audio is having to restore anything from swap in the
audio chain. The only thing swap gives with audio work is a chance to save
your work if you hit the memory wall.

I don't know if it makes any difference, but hard drives stream off the
outside of the disk faster than the inside. So using a partition on the
high half of the drive will stream data faster. Also taking a number of
drives and doing raid striping (RAID 10) will allow the system to be
writing to both disks (or more, some servers have 10s or 100s of drives)
at the same time so the stream to drive cam be twice as fast or more with
more than two drive sets. but I have never gotten to a place where I have
felt the need to try these things though.




-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net