2 Sep
2004
2 Sep
'04
4:21 p.m.
Dave Phillips wrote:
Mark Knecht wrote:
1394 hard drives work pretty well for me under both the 2.4 Planet
kernels and 2.6 Gentoo kernel. I have more trouble with CDRW/DVD drives
which do not work well under either in my experience. This is probably
not an issue for you. I do 1394 chips and software for a living so I try
a lot of this out on my company's nickle.
1394 performance under Linux is not what it should/could be. The Linux
1394 stack doesn't optimize gap count automatically so throughput is
slow. (Maybe 5-11MB/S?) I think there may be some little stand alone
apps that will allow you to set the gap count by hand which would help.
Humm...I just remembered that I had my main Pro Tools 1394 audio drive
in my laptop bag so I plugged it in and ran hdparm to get some results.
Better than I thought:
root@flash ~ # hdparm -tT /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 1640 MB in 2.00 seconds = 818.49 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 56 MB in 3.15 seconds = 17.75 MB/sec
Speeds are higher under Windows, but this isn't bad at all.
root@flash ~ # uname -a
Linux flash 2.6.8-gentoo-r2 #3 Fri Aug 27 11:05:03 PDT 2004 i686 Mobile
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.06GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
root@flash ~ #
I don't have a 2.4 series kernel here to test with. My laptop's chipset
doesn't work well under 2.4. Too new and many important things not
supported.
I don't remember how to extract the actual IDE drive parameters out of
this 1394 drive case. I think the drive is a 7200RPM but it could be
5400. I don't remember and I'm sure anything you bought today would be
faster. I've used this one for 18-24 months at least. The drive is set
up with larger than normal (32K) cluster sizes and is a FAT drive so
that I can use with both Pro Tools and other OS's as required. (Heck - I
just did!) ;-)
From dmesg:
<SNIP>
ieee1394: Host added: ID:BUS[0-00:1023] GUID[413f0200b723013d]
ip1394: $Rev: 1224 $ Ben Collins <bcollins(a)debian.org>
ip1394: eth1: IEEE-1394 IPv4 over 1394 Ethernet (fw-host0)
eth0: link up, 10Mbps, half-duplex, lpa 0x0000
ieee1394: Node added: ID:BUS[0-01:1023] GUID[0001d20000030fc1]
ieee1394: The root node is not cycle master capable; selecting a new
root node and resetting...
ieee1394: Node changed: 0-01:1023 -> 0-00:1023
ieee1394: Node changed: 0-00:1023 -> 0-01:1023
sbp2: $Rev: 1219 $ Ben Collins <bcollins(a)debian.org>
scsi0 : SCSI emulation for IEEE-1394 SBP-2 Devices
ieee1394: sbp2: Logged into SBP-2 device
ieee1394: Node 0-00:1023: Max speed [S400] - Max payload [2048]
Vendor: WDC WD40 Model: 0BB-32CXA0 Rev:
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 06
Attached scsi generic sg0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0, type 0
SCSI device sda: 78165360 512-byte hdwr sectors (40021 MB)
sda: asking for cache data failed
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
root@flash ~ #
<SNIP>
HTH,
Mark
Mark Knecht wrote:
<SNIP>
Ja, I kinda figured that... :(
I can get a good deal on something not-state-of-the-art that would still
be much faster than my current box, so it's still a consideration.
Thanks especially for your recommendation re: hard-disk, I'll follow up
on that too. Btw, is there support for that disk in the 2.4 kernel
series ? I'm not planning a kernel upgrade at this time and would rather
avoid it right now.
Best,
dp
Well, obviously an 800MHz machine will at
first glance seem
underpowered compared to all the newer stuff out there, but my
thought is that for just recording/playback you'll probably be fine
if you pay close attention to the rest of your hardware.
I meant to include the comment that with an 800MHz machine you should
not plan on using many, if any, plugins.