5 Apr
2013
5 Apr
'13
12:09 a.m.
Hi,
What's the latest consensus? Is it recommended to have a separate
drive for audio on a Linux system? Separate partition? I'm just
wondering about performance, not practical issues like moving audio
around or reinstalling the system, etc. As we know there are Mac/PC
DAW's that need things separate. Thanks.
5 Apr
5 Apr
12:26 a.m.
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 6:09 PM, Grekim Jennings
<grekimj(a)acousticrefuge.com> wrote:
What's the latest consensus? Is it recommended
to have a separate drive
for audio on a Linux system? Separate partition? I'm just wondering about
performance, not practical issues like moving audio around or reinstalling
the system, etc. As we know there are Mac/PC DAW's that need things
separate. Thanks.
Yes, OS on one drive, audio on a separate dedicated drive is best for
performance (and if you are using a sampler, the samples should be on
their own dedicated drive, if possible). Pretty standard practice for
audio or video workstation, regardless of OS.
--
Brett W. McCoy -- http://www.brettwmccoy.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the rhythm of music a secret is hidden; If I were to divulge it,
it would overturn the world."
-- Jelaleddin Rumi
3:10 a.m.
On Thu, 2013-04-04 at 18:25 -0400, Brett McCoy wrote:
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 6:09 PM, Grekim Jennings
<grekimj(a)acousticrefuge.com> wrote:
I don't think that this usually is needed, using one drive with one
partition IMO usually isn't a bottleneck. It's IMO useful to separate
drives regarding to convenience, but not regarding to performance.
I might be mistaken, but I can't see a reason for a reasonably machine
to use 3 HDDs for audio production, to get a better performance.
What's the latest consensus? Is it
recommended to have a separate drive
for audio on a Linux system? Separate partition? I'm just wondering about
performance, not practical issues like moving audio around or reinstalling
the system, etc. As we know there are Mac/PC DAW's that need things
separate. Thanks.
Yes, OS on one drive, audio on a separate dedicated drive is best for
performance (and if you are using a sampler, the samples should be on
their own dedicated drive, if possible). Pretty standard practice for
audio or video workstation, regardless of OS. 
8 Apr
8 Apr
10:09 a.m.
Ralf you may be right for low track count home studio work, but for
professional work with multiple tracks on playback and record with very low
latency (2.9msec here) is pretty much standard to have seperate drives.
On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 3:10 AM, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf(a)alice-dsl.net>wrote;wrote:
On Thu, 2013-04-04 at 18:25 -0400, Brett McCoy wrote:
I don't think that this usually is needed, using one drive with one
partition IMO usually isn't a bottleneck. It's IMO useful to separate
drives regarding to convenience, but not regarding to performance.
I might be mistaken, but I can't see a reason for a reasonably machine
to use 3 HDDs for audio production, to get a better performance.
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On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 6:09 PM, Grekim Jennings
<grekimj(a)acousticrefuge.com> wrote:
> What's the latest consensus? Is it recommended to have a separate
drive
> for audio on a Linux system? Separate
partition? I'm just wondering
about
> performance, not practical issues like
moving audio around or
reinstalling
the
system, etc. As we know there are Mac/PC DAW's that need things
separate. Thanks.
Yes, OS on one drive, audio on a separate dedicated drive is best for
performance (and if you are using a sampler, the samples should be on
their own dedicated drive, if possible). Pretty standard practice for
audio or video workstation, regardless of OS. 
10 Apr
10 Apr
12:46 a.m.
Am 05.04.2013 03:10, schrieb Ralf Mardorf:
On Thu, 2013-04-04 at 18:25 -0400, Brett McCoy wrote:
This may be true in 99.9 out of 100 minutes of recording until that
statistically unlikely event happens, that some operation is keen to
load a lib from the disk while another important operation wants to load
another 20 seconds 96/32 audio data for 32 tracks from the very same disk.
While I agree, that Linux in pretty good in using RAM for caching and we
live in times where a complete 4-min track on 20+ tracks fits into a
RAM-disk I would not take chances.
I have a SSD for all the software and the OS and a conventional drive
for the audio/video data plus 8Gig RAM and so I do not need to even
think about, whether bad side-effects could occure or not. Not that
expensive and good for my nerves... ;-)
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 6:09 PM, Grekim Jennings
<grekimj(a)acousticrefuge.com> wrote:
I don't think that this usually is needed, using one drive with one
partition IMO usually isn't a bottleneck. What's the latest consensus? Is it
recommended to have a separate drive
for audio on a Linux system? Separate partition? I'm just wondering about
performance, not practical issues like moving audio around or reinstalling
the system, etc. As we know there are Mac/PC DAW's that need things
separate. Thanks.
Yes, OS on one drive, audio on a separate dedicated drive is best for
performance (and if you are using a sampler, the samples should be on
their own dedicated drive, if possible). Pretty standard practice for
audio or video workstation, regardless of OS. It's IMO useful to separate
drives regarding to convenience, but not regarding to performance.
I might be mistaken, but I can't see a reason for a reasonably machine
to use 3 HDDs for audio production, to get a better performance.
_______________________________________________
Linux-audio-user mailing list
Linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
1:33 a.m.
On Wed, 2013-04-10 at 00:46 +0200, Hartmut Noack wrote:
Am 05.04.2013 03:10, schrieb Ralf Mardorf:
I've got two drives installed and an external drive, so usually I use
two, but not three drives. Since I'm just playing at the moment, no
serious work, I only use one drive for everything. Not a good test set
up right now, since only one sequencer and 2 soft synth are running ;),
it might become more complex. FWIW 4 GiB - framebuffer here.
I don't think that this usually is needed,
using one drive with one
partition IMO usually isn't a bottleneck.
This may be true in 99.9 out of 100 minutes of recording until that
statistically unlikely event happens, that some operation is keen to
load a lib from the disk while another important operation wants to load
another 20 seconds 96/32 audio data for 32 tracks from the very same disk.
While I agree, that Linux in pretty good in using RAM for caching and we
live in times where a complete 4-min track on 20+ tracks fits into a
RAM-disk I would not take chances.
I have a SSD for all the software and the OS and a conventional drive
for the audio/video data plus 8Gig RAM and so I do not need to even
think about, whether bad side-effects could occure or not. Not that
expensive and good for my nerves... ;-) 
5 Apr
5 Apr
12:55 a.m.
On Thu, April 4, 2013 3:09 pm, Grekim Jennings wrote:
Hi,
What's the latest consensus? Is it recommended to have a separate
drive for audio on a Linux system? Separate partition? I'm just
wondering about performance, not practical issues like moving audio
around or reinstalling the system, etc. As we know there are Mac/PC
DAW's that need things separate. Thanks.
I have not had any issues with using a DAW on one disk/partition. Having
said that, I am not sure I have ever gotten to the point that I have
written enough that the buffers _had_ to be cleared to make more room in
memory. I have 2.5G of ram, but most audio uses are in around 1G for the
apps... so 10M/minute/2channels or so. 5minutes at 16 channels is still
less than 500meg. So there is still 1g unused or so. (I was thinking
16bit, but I guess we are doing 32 bit, so maybe double that)
What will mess up audio is having to restore anything from swap in the
audio chain. The only thing swap gives with audio work is a chance to save
your work if you hit the memory wall.
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. Also taking a number of
drives and doing raid striping (RAID 10) will allow the system to be
writing to both disks (or more, some servers have 10s or 100s of drives)
at the same time so the stream to drive cam be twice as fast or more with
more than two drive sets. but I have never gotten to a place where I have
felt the need to try these things though.
--
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net
11 Apr
11 Apr
7:38 p.m.
On 4/4/13, Len Ovens <len(a)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.
12 Apr
12 Apr
4:58 a.m.
On Thu, 2013-04-11 at 13:38 -0400, Egor Sanin wrote:
On 4/4/13, Len Ovens <len(a)ovenwerks.net> wrote:
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@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@archlinux 02song.a]$ grep 18: /proc/interrupts
18: 24 19924 IO-APIC-fasteoi snd_hdspm
Regards,
Ralf
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.
4179
days inactive
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days old
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8 comments
7 participants
participants (7)
-
Brett McCoy -
Egor Sanin -
Grekim Jennings -
Hartmut Noack -
Len Ovens -
Moshe Werner -
Ralf Mardorf