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

[Hartmut Noack]

Am 05.04.2013 03:10, schrieb Ralf Mardorf:
> On Thu, 2013-04-04 at 18:25 -0400, Brett McCoy wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 6:09 PM, Grekim Jennings
>> <grekimj at acousticrefuge.com> wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> Yes, OS on one drive, audio on a separate dedicated drive is best for
>> performance (and if you are using a sampler, the samples should be on
>> their own dedicated drive, if possible). Pretty standard practice for
>> audio or video workstation, regardless of OS.
> 
> I don't think that this usually is needed, using one drive with one
> partition IMO usually isn't a bottleneck.

This may be true in 99.9 out of 100 minutes of recording until that
statistically unlikely event happens, that some operation is keen to
load a lib from the disk while another important operation wants to load
another 20 seconds 96/32 audio data for 32 tracks from the very same disk.

While I agree, that Linux in pretty good in using RAM for caching and we
live in times where a complete 4-min track on 20+ tracks fits into a
RAM-disk I would not take chances.

I have a SSD for all the software and the OS and a conventional drive
for the audio/video data plus 8Gig RAM and so I do not need to even
think about, whether bad side-effects could occure or not. Not that
expensive and good for my nerves... ;-)

> It's IMO useful to separate
> drives regarding to convenience, but not regarding to performance.
> 
> I might be mistaken, but I can't see a reason for a reasonably machine
> to use 3 HDDs for audio production, to get a better performance.
> 
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