[linux-audio-user] Interuptions While Recording

Greetings, I was having interruptions when recording with ecasound. Someone at the ecasound list suggested that it was because my Hard Drive was slow. I upgraded from a 5400 RPM Drive to a 7200 RPM Drive and it did help. The inturuptions are less often and shorter. They're usually just an occasional click, and at times can be about a half a second of silence (while recording). When I listen to the recording, at the spots where the interuptions happen, the parts are edited out. In other words, there is __no__ silence (in the file) where the interuptions happen, but it's as if someone just cut those parts out of the recording and pasted the remaining file together. I found several tutorials on hdparm on the internet. I used it to check my Hard Drive's capabilities and carefully made adjustments accordingly. Nothing worked. In fact most of the time the -Tt flag showed that the Timing buffered disk reads went down considerably. And, of course the interuptions kept happening. Here is the output of hdparm -Tt /dev/hda: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.97 seconds =131.96 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.35 seconds = 47.41 MB/sec Is this considered slow (when it comes to doing 16 bit 2 channel 44100 Multitrack Recording)? I did the command "dsmeg" and found the line: "SiS730 ATA 100 controller" And the Mother Board Manual says: "The PCI IDE also supports PIO Mode 3 and 4, UDMA33/66/100 IDE" Does this means it only capable of 100 MB/sec Data Transfer Rate? And does this even have much of a bearing on the interuptions I'm having? I installed an ATA/133 PCI Adapter Card and did the command hdparm -Tt /dev/hda and got the following output: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.95 seconds =134.74 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 2.19 seconds = 29.22 MB/sec I'm not sure why it produced lower numbers. This could be a configuration problem. But I'm not even sure if the card is nessesary. My Software/Hardware: SuSE 8.1 k7SEM Mother Board AMD Duron 1Ghz Processor 256 Megs Ram Soundblaster Live! 5.1 alsa Version 0.9.0.cvs20020903-13 (That's the Alsa that installed with SuSE 8.1 - It hasn't been altered in any way) Anyone have a clue how to stop these interuptions? Any help would be appreciated Rocco __________________________________________________________________ The NEW Netscape 7.0 browser is now available. Upgrade now! http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/download.jsp Get your own FREE, personal Netscape Mail account today at http://webmail.netscape.com/