On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 7:19 AM, rosea.grammostola <rosea.grammostola(a)gmail.com> wrote: I mount it at /audio but that's just a personal preference. Actually, I have 3 external audio drives, 1394-based. My system mounts as /audio/audio1/ /audio/audio2/ /audio/audio3/ Ardour handles the sort of 'RAID' aspects of using the drives automatically, throwing some audio files on what ever drive it wants to to balance loading. My drives are old and therefore slow. They all run around 30-40MB/S over 1394. I think with a newer system you could use a single high-speed SATA drive which will get you > 100MB/S on a single drive and there wouldn't be much value in using the Ardour RAID stuff which causes the complication of when you want to back up a session you have to get it from 3 places. If I did that I'd personally go with a small, fast SATA audio drive, 200-300MB probably, and then build some sort of backup strategy using rsync. That's what I currently do with VMWare isntances. I have two 500GB drives running RAID0 for speed where I run 4 copies of Windows. I do daily rsync backups from RAID0 to a 3-drive RAID1for safety. Once a month I use rsync to backup the RAID1 to a RAID1 on a different computer. I don't like losing data. - Mark - Mark

On 12/17/2010 04:21 PM, rosea.grammostola wrote: You could do that but then you will loose a lot of of config files and _directories_ that belong to audio applications ;) Best, Jeremy

On 12/23/10 07:42, david wrote: If you are concerned about heat & noise, consider a 2.5" drive. The higher the density, the higher the number of bits read per time. So drive size (~density because you can only use a certain number of platters) has a direct corelation with throughput. Flo -- Machines can do the work, so people have time to think. public key DA43FEF4 x-hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 10:42 PM, david <gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com> wrote: I own 8 of the WD 1TB Green drives along with 5 WD 500GB RAID Edition drives so I've seen this stuff up close over the last year.. A couple of points for consideration: 1) The Green drives do typically run at lower RPM. It's part of the power saving strategy. I don't typically thing drive RPM has a huge impact on audio work but clearly others could have a differing opinion on that. It would make for an interesting conversation I think. 2) The biggest part of power saving on the WD Green drives is that they park the heads _very_ often. While this hasn't been a big problem under Windows for me under Linux it's a bit of an unknown at this point. I have one system that uses one of the 1TB drives as the main system drive. The head gets parked and then Linux wakes it up every 2 minutes or so. The issue is these drives are only spec'ed at 300,000 head parks over their lifetime and then they are out of spec. 30 parks per minute * 24 hours * 365 days = 262,800 head parks. Basically, if the drive is left in a Linux system that's powered up all the time then the drive is out of spec in a little over a year. Does this matter? I don't know. I have one machine that is a year old and it's approaching end-of-life? 3) One of the potential advantage I see with the larger density drives is they are using 4K sector sizes instead of 512 byte. As long as you partition on a 4K sector you only need to do one read of the drive to get 4K vs 8 reads with older 512 byte drives. In my mind that's a big potential win in terms of real speed independent of what the RPM of the drive might be. For audio data where you have long streams of data you aren't going to waste much disk space. Please note that last time I looked the 4K drives don't identify them selves as such so you have to know how to do the partitioning correctly up front, keeping everything on a 4K boundary by hand. If you don't these drives become __VERY, VERY, VERY__ slow. Hope this helps, Mark

2010/12/24 Jörn Nettingsmeier <nettings(a)folkwang-hochschule.de>de>: Yeah, I've heard of that, and I suspect it works. I've not used it myself. I felt it reasonable to let folks know what they were buying and what the issues might be. Who knows what the issues might be with that feature turned off? Certainly power consumption will go up. Maybe most folks don't leave their DAWs powered up 24/7, I don't know. Thanks for adding the info. Cheers, Mark

2010/12/24 Jörn Nettingsmeier &lt;nettings(a)folkwang-hochschule.de&gt;de>: <SNIP> Is it? In what way? Something like hdparm -tT or something else? Reaching its lifetime would be a good thing. I think that really depends on how long it's left asleep. At this 2 minute rate I'm seeing I suspect it lowers power to put it to sleep but I don't know. No debate there. Completely agree. You too! - Mark

2010/12/24 Jörn Nettingsmeier &lt;nettings(a)folkwang-hochschule.de&gt;de>: Ah, certainly. Must be true if the heads aren't parked at all. Is that what that firmware does, or does it just slow down how often it's parked? That's what I remembered also but the number I posted in replying to Jouni was 269117 and the Power On Hours counter currently says 7535 which is 313 days or around 10 months. 269117 / 7535 is about 35/hour or roughly 2 minutes. I'm running Gentoo and have no recollection of making any changes or ever finding a setting that slowed it down significantly but I admit I didn't try very hard. I'm just doing backups and figured I'd swap in another drive when it gets up too high. I have a bunch of these drives never opened as I couldn't return them, it was too late, and I never used them so far. - Mark

On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 8:56 AM, Jouni Rinne &lt;l33tmmx(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: It's not the firmware that you are looking for but rather the WD application that changes the firmware that's in the drive. Good search terms are: firmware change S.M.A.R.T Attribute 193 You will finds LOTS of posts on the subject. The actual software (that I know about - there may be more than one for this function so be careful) is called WDIDLE3.exe. I am not aware as to this software supporting booting from a USB stick, etc., so I've not looked into using it myself. Here is a WD10EARS drive that's been turned on 24/7 basically since last February: (10-11 months) using the command smartctl --all /dev/sda It's a desktop machine. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 131 128 021 Pre-fail Always - 6408 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 33 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 090 090 000 Old_age Always - 7535 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 32 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 11 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 111 111 000 Old_age Always - 269117 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 124 113 000 Old_age Always - 23 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0 Hope this helps, Mark

On Fri, 24 Dec 2010 19:00:06 +0100 Jörn Nettingsmeier &lt;nettings(a)folkwang-hochschule.de&gt; wrote: Okay, found the correct download place via a forum: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113&lan… . According to the same forum it should also apply to the 2TB WD20EADS drive I have. Until now, WD drives have been super-reliable for me, the only make I've got no trouble with, but this head parking stuff is insane... Now I should decide whether I 1) return the drive (the data I have in there *should* still fit on my other drives) and replace it with a Seagate or 2) try to fix the firmware. Thanks for hints and help, and merry Xmas! JR

On 12/25/2010 01:03 AM, Mark Knecht wrote: what on earth is "raid edition"? makes all my BS indicators flash red... i can't imagine any special hardware feature "required for raid". and like faberman remarked in another mail, i really can't see any reason to buy disks of less than a terabyte these days, as increased density will almost always imply increased throughput, at identical or only very slightly increased power consumption.

2010/12/24 Jörn Nettingsmeier &lt;nettings(a)folkwang-hochschule.de&gt;de>: No, there's no need to see red. It's real stuff. The biggest deal for RAID is TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) which makes sure that drives keep responding so the RAID array doesn't drop the drive unnecessarily. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLER These drives are 7200RPM, which you can probably get in a Green drive if you look long enough. However they are rated for far more hours of life also. - Mark

--- On Thu, 12/23/10, Arnold Krille &lt;arnold(a)arnoldarts.de&gt; wrote: Yes, I spend a lot of my time living in denial. I was not writing about cost in terms of money. Everyone knows that 1-2TB drives are cheaper than candy these days. I was writing about cost in terms of reading/writing. I would be willing to pay more for a 500GB drive if there is a performance benefit.

On 23 December 2010 at 19:21, Arnold Krille &lt;arnold(a)arnoldarts.de&gt; wrote: I've got to agree with that. I've had Quantum, Seagate, CDC, Western Digital, Fujitsu and IBM, and many of each over the years. Each of those brands, except for CDC has performed flawlessly for 5-7 years. Also, each of those brands has died within 1-2 years. The CDCs were a problem. But, I bought them used and back when 600MB was a huge capacity. If you have a look at the buyer comments at an on-line retail site, Newegg would be one, then you'll see the new user comments will have rave reviews for many months or even over a year solid, followed by reviews about DOA drives and drives that fail too soon. This seems to happen for all brands I buy, which seems to add credence to the urban lore about disk drives that some batches of drives are fine and then batches are bad. If you could figure out which batch is good in advance of a purchase, then you'd be set. As for quietness, my Seagate 7200RPM Barracuda (Ultra ATA 100, up to 320GB) drives are very quiet. Also my Western Digital Caviar (500GB and 1TB SATA) drives are very quiet. My Fujitsu drives are very loud, even though they're 7200RPM. I pulled the Fujitsu drives from my machines as they're even too loud for a home office environment. If you can find a retailer that will sell you drives with a "no questions asked" return policy, then you can decide if they're quiet enough. For my failing drives, Newegg was good about the DOAs. Quantum and IBM exchanged my dead drives for reconditioned units, even though those dead drives were way past their warranty period. Seagate customer support helped me diagnose my drive's problem with some of their software (yes, on Linux!) and then exchanged that drive for a reconditioned unit. I have no experience with the other vendors' customer service folks. I hope that's useful info. As was said earlier, good luck! -- Kevin

On 12/23/2010 03:59 AM, Ivan K wrote: that's an issue, sure. but i write my audio data to *two* other drives in RAID1. it's louder in day-to-day operations, but not in the long term, when you factor in the noise a dying hard drive makes, together with the noise the sound engineer makes when that happens in the middle of an important session. just an inverse recommendation: do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, buy western digital "green edition" drives - they think it's a brilliant idea to park their heads 8 times a minute (as a power saving measure!), which means they effectively self-destruct within a few months. my approach for 24/7 drives is: as large as possible, since it's the motors that consume power, not the gigabytes. to shelf old projects, i have bought a little gadget that's effectively an external sata backplane that you can stick raw drives into (with usb2 and e-sata connectors to the computer). i buy whatever is cheapest per terabyte for those (last time i looked, it was 1.5). no. if you don't need a full TB (from which i deduce you are not into really huge sessions and projects), the performance of any current sata drive should be more than adequate. us audio guys really don't have to care anymore for throughput... even seek speed won't be that important, because we usually read large chunks of data, where the initial delay is insignificant - as opposed to, say, a mail server, where hundreds of users read thousands of very small files every second. scsi is dead. sata beats the crap out of it in terms of performance/price. and for those extremely fast but small 15k platter arrays which used to be a scsi mainstay, time is running out fast with the advent of SSDs.

On Sunday 26 December 2010 11:09:00 Brent Busby wrote: While that is true in general, the disk directly attached to the pc's main frame will produce a lot of low frequency noise from resonances. I found some drive-bays at reichelt that work without trays and have all the inner parts with the hdd attached via shock-absorbers. Definitely worth its 21€... http://www.reichelt.de/?ACTION=3;GROUP=E66;GROUPID=733;ARTICLE=91887;SID=28… Have fun, Arnold

On 12/26/2010 06:09 PM, Brent Busby wrote: I recommend reading silentpcreview.com and take their recommendations if you want a quiet computer. Once I got a quiet case, quieted down the case fans, CPU fans, and the power supply, the hard drives were the noisiest part of my system. The best thing by far is to decouple the hard drive from the case. Suspending the drives in elastic bands as shown here is very cheap and very effective: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article8-page2.html This worked brilliantly for me and now my computer is almost silent in a quiet room. Or just laying the hard drive upside-down on foam rubber on the floor of the case works as well, too. This article should be interesting as well if you are interested in quiet drives: http://www.silentpcreview.com/Recommended_Hard_Drives But in general they recommend notebook hard drives if you want a quiet drive and low heat.