[LAU] SSD for Linux audio? (Was: Re: Massive Xruns during recording)

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 7 Dec 2017 00:14:01 +0100 (CET), Jeanette C. wrote:
>Are there particular compatibility issues (in software/drivers) that I
>must take into account? From the hardware side: are there certain 
>models/series/vendors that have proved especially advantageous to
>audio work?

Hi,

I don't know.

>My motherboard does offer SATA2 V3, otherwise I see no particular
>hardware restrictions.

They still will be faster than SATA 2 HDDs. However, when I migrated
from SATA 2 to SATA 3 I was surprised about the quick startup, it's
more or less power on = booted and I'm still amazed about the increased
virtualbox performance, my Windows 7 guest became faster than the
children's "offener Ganztag" Windows 7 installs on bare metal. Unlikely
an issue for you, but the known GTK app performance issues, such as the
visible black box when widgets are established, have nothing to do with
the disk drives.

>I'd be grateful for some advice. If on some points there is nothing
>particular to consider that would be a sufficient answer in
>itself.oczclout

I don't know, but as already mentioned by an earlier reply to the
former subject, I decided to buy OCZ SSDs, because they were the cheapest
that time and the AUR provide packages for OCZ tools, ocz-ssd-utility,
oczclout and ocztoolbox, see https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=0&K=ocz .

My drives are neither supported by clout (the CLI tool to e.g. show smart
attributes), nor by ocztoolbox (a GUI). Fortunately ocz-ssd-utility (another
GUI) does the job, since smartctl is quite useless:

[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ sudo smartctl -A /dev/sda | grep Unknown
167 Unknown_Attribute       0x0022   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
168 Unknown_Attribute       0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
169 Unknown_Attribute       0x0003   100   100   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
173 Unknown_Attribute       0x0012   180   180   000    Old_age   Always       -       0

Actually the GUI explains the "Unknown_Attributes".

167 SSD Protect Mode
168 SATA PHY Error Count
169 Bad Block Count
173 Erase Count

Regards,
Ralf