25 Jun
2007
25 Jun
'07
7:18 p.m.
Just ordered a 320G sata hard disk to replace my increasingly noisy 40G IDE
disk (which is currently formatted with ReiserFS). I think I've read (here)
that ReiserFS isn't the best filesystem for audio work, but I would like to
retain journaling if possible.
Does ext3 play nice with an RT kernel, or is it the journaling that causes the
problems for ReiserFS
Also should I plan to convert existing partitions on another disk (my music
library) to ext3, or is it only the partitions actively used in audio work
that matter?
Many thanks in advance.
--
David Haggett
25 Jun
25 Jun
8:12 p.m.
On 25 June 2007 at 22:17, David Haggett <david(a)haggett.demon.co.uk> wrote:
Just ordered a 320G sata hard disk to replace my
increasingly
noisy 40G IDE disk (which is currently formatted with
ReiserFS). I think I've read (here) that ReiserFS isn't the
best filesystem for audio work, but I would like to retain
journaling if possible.
Does ext3 play nice with an RT kernel, or is it the journaling
that causes the problems for ReiserFS
Also should I plan to convert existing partitions on another
disk (my music library) to ext3, or is it only the partitions
actively used in audio work that matter?
Many thanks in advance.
I can't answer your question with certainty or with much data
to back up my viewpoint. All I can say is that I've been doing
audio work for a couple of years now on a 2GHz Celeron machine
with 1GB of RAM and 2 ext3 partitions (/ and /home) on my ATA100
drive. My audio data is in /home and my programs are for the
most part in /. I've had really good luck. I've only seen one
case where the disk couldn't keep up, and that was when I was
trying to play 70 tracks of 16-bit 44.1kHz data simultaneously.
Once enough of the data was cached, then ardour actually *did*
play all that. But, it took 3-5 false starts to get enough
cached.
There are probably better ways to achieve more performance.
But, things work for me.
Good luck...
--
Kevin
"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its
continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the
computer hardware industry...", Henry Petroski [can you say "Windows"?]
11:11 p.m.
On 6/25/07, David Haggett <david(a)haggett.demon.co.uk> wrote:
Just ordered a 320G sata hard disk to replace my
increasingly noisy 40G IDE
disk (which is currently formatted with ReiserFS). I think I've read (here)
that ReiserFS isn't the best filesystem for audio work, but I would like to
retain journaling if possible.
Does ext3 play nice with an RT kernel, or is it the journaling that causes the
problems for ReiserFS
Also should I plan to convert existing partitions on another disk (my music
library) to ext3, or is it only the partitions actively used in audio work
that matter?
Many thanks in advance.
--
David Haggett
All in all I don't think it matters much. In general I think either is
fine for audio. I typically use vfat for audio partitions so that I
can easily move the 1394 drive to a Windows box without any bother.
If I was going to make the choice you suggest I'd likely go for ext2
as requires slightly less work for the system than carrying the
overhead of doing the ext3 stuff and I figure that I would never know
when I'm going to run out of compute cycles. Also I believe that ext3
keeps the extra information in a separate location on the drive from
the data which requires extra head seeking and slows things down a bit
at times.
However you should temper all this with a somewhat greater need to do
backups using vfat or ext2 since you have less protection from little
problems.
Hope that gives you a few ideas to mull over.
Cheers,
Mark
26 Jun
26 Jun
2:27 a.m.
Mark Knecht wrote:
On 6/25/07, David Haggett
<david(a)haggett.demon.co.uk> wrote:
[snips]
> Does ext3 play nice with an RT kernel, or is it
the journaling that
> causes the
> problems for ReiserFS
[snips]
All in all I don't think it matters much. In
general I think either is
fine for audio. I typically use vfat for audio partitions so that I
can easily move the 1394 drive to a Windows box without any bother.
If I was going to make the choice you suggest I'd likely go for ext2
as requires slightly less work for the system than carrying the
overhead of doing the ext3 stuff and I figure that I would never know
when I'm going to run out of compute cycles. Also I believe that ext3
keeps the extra information in a separate location on the drive from
the data which requires extra head seeking and slows things down a bit
at times.
Don't know about that, but a friend of mine who migrated his file server
from ext2 to ext3 reported getting 2-3 times the throughput on large
network transfers to the server. I'd think that might have some impact
on recording speed.
--
David
gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
6:39 a.m.
Mark Knecht wrote:
If I was going to make the choice you suggest I'd
likely go for ext2
as requires slightly less work for the system than carrying the
overhead of doing the ext3 stuff and I figure that I would never know
when I'm going to run out of compute cycles.
I'd seriously advise against that, if you don't absolutely have to.
You only need one occasion with a power failure or complete X lockup
(hard reset the only thing that works) to make ext3 worth your while
(or any journalling filesystem, for that matter). If you need more
speed, I'd do yourself a favour and get a second drive, software
raid-0 or raid-5 is easy to configure and allows for huge write
speeds. You do need to make sure that you move the data off the raid
0 array after your done, if you want more reliability for long-term
storage.
I believe it's even possible to make 2 partitions on each drive, and
configure a raid-0 array with the first set and a raid-1 array with
the second set. I haven't tried this out for performance-testing, but
it should work. If you make the raid-0 big enough for typical
recording, you can move the data to the raid-1 after your done.
Regards,
Hein Zelle
--
Unix is user friendly. It's just very particular about who
it's friends are.
Hein Zelle hein(a)icce.rug.nl
http://www.icce.rug.nl/~hein
8:44 a.m.
Yes, it is possible to make 2 or more partitions on each disk and
configure each pair (hda1-hdb1, etc) with a different raid; however I
think the boot partition needs to be raid1.
It's really an easy task with id done with debian-installer; I cannot
say what the multimedia performance is, since I used it for GIS only.
But I can say that write/read performance on raid0 was really big, and
there were no disks fails on 3 years of use (well, disks were new at the
time)
Regards,
Roman
Mark Knecht wrote:
I believe it's even possible to make 2 partitions
on each drive, and
configure a raid-0 array with the first set and a raid-1 array with
the second set. I haven't tried this out for performance-testing, but
it should work. If you make the raid-0 big enough for typical
recording, you can move the data to the raid-1 after your done.
Regards,
Hein Zelle
6394
days inactive
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days old
linux-audio-user@lists.linuxaudio.org
5 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
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david -
David Haggett -
Hein Zelle -
Kevin Cosgrove -
Mark Knecht -
Roman Muñoz