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

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 2013-04-11 at 13:38 -0400, Egor Sanin wrote:
> On 4/4/13, Len Ovens <len at ovenwerks.net> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> The small print being that this is only true for a Hard Disk Drives
> (HDD), not true for a Solid State Drive (SSD) which are not uncommon
> these days.

True, but I still have doubts that the HDDs are the bottlenecks. They
aren't that slow and they've got several heads.

Other factors seem to be more important.

When I e.g. move a window, I get audible gaps without getting xruns,
while the audio session is that small, that everything is, resp. should
be in the RAM.

IOW I'm experiencing and I experienced all kinds of inexplicable issues
and IMO it's more likely that something is really fishy, than something
like using 1 instead of 2 drives does cause an issue.

It can't harm to use several drives, but I experienced using 1 drive
only doesn't cause (additional) issues. I own several drives myself and
usually I use 2 drives. Everybody with several drives could make tests
and use one drive only for a test. It shouldn't make a difference.

[rocketmouse at archlinux 02song.a]$ service rtirq status

  PID CLS RTPRIO  NI PRI %CPU STAT COMMAND	
   36 FF      90   - 130  0.0 S    irq/8-rtc0	
  197 FF      85   - 125  0.0 S    irq/18-snd_hdsp	
  234 FF      80   - 120  0.0 S    irq/20-snd_ice1	
  236 FF      79   - 119  0.0 S    irq/21-snd_ice1	
   90 FF      75   - 115  0.0 S    irq/19-ehci_hcd	
   93 FF      75   - 115  0.0 S    irq/16-ohci_hcd	
  107 FF      74   - 114  0.1 S    irq/17-ohci_hcd	
  113 FF      73   - 113  0.0 S    irq/17-ohci_hcd	
   34 FF      70   - 110  0.0 S    irq/1-i8042	
   24 FF      50   -  90  0.0 S    irq/9-acpi	
   50 FF      50   -  90  0.0 S    irq/42-radeon	
   95 FF      50   -  90  0.0 S    irq/14-pata_ati	
   96 FF      50   -  90  0.0 S    irq/15-pata_ati	
  101 FF      50   -  90  0.1 S    irq/22-ahci	
  195 FF      50   -  90  0.0 S    irq/7-parport0	
  493 FF      50   -  90  0.0 S    irq/43-enp3s0	
    3 FF       1   -  41  0.1 S    ksoftirqd/0	
   13 FF       1   -  41  0.1 S    ksoftirqd/1	

[rocketmouse at archlinux 02song.a]$ grep 18: /proc/interrupts
 18:         24      19924   IO-APIC-fasteoi   snd_hdspm

Regards,
Ralf