9 Mar
2013
9 Mar
'13
6 p.m.
On Sat, March 9, 2013 4:30 am, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
an external hard drive does spin down too often for my
taste. It's a
http://www.wdc.com/global/products/specs/?driveID=762&language=1 and I
wonder if there's a way to disable it.
So far as i can tell mine doesn't, but then mine is a case I added a drive
from an old laptop that stopped working. BTW this is not the drive itself
but the USB board... Or if it is the in the drive itself, it would be the
same if the drive was used internally.
Regarding to a German PDF SmartWare doesn't
support this particular
external hard drive and even if it would, it seems to need Windows or OS
X.
So all you need is to provide disk activity every 8 or nine minutes...
sync or something. I am not sure but I don't know how bad sync is at
grabbing system resources and if there are a lot of full buffers this
could take some time to complete.
Is there a way to adjust this feature? I fear that
spinning up and down
again and again, will reduce the lifetime of the drive significantly and
assumed I'll use it for recording, it might cause performance issues.
I don't know if this would cause an early fail, but from the
manufacturer's POV, so long as it is past warranty that is a good thing :P
Is it possible to use such drives for recording,
without any risk? If I
would test it, I might not cover all worst case scenarios, think it
wouldn't cause issues and then be surprised if it fails in an
unfavorable moment.
This is a hard issue, because I have 2.5G ram. My OS and all the apps I
use for recording take up maybe about 1G (cause I was able to record when
I only had 1G). So there is 1.5G worth of ram that can buffer data going
to coming from disk. I might be able to record several tracks without ever
touching the drive. So to test this you have to have enough tracks to fill
ram buffers and force write to disk. Now when tracking, normally I am
reading a bunch of tracks and only writing one or two. Reading takes less
system resources than writing (I think... requires inode writes at least)
so if the system is smart it will off load the reading first. Once it does
that your drive will stay spinning, so the write part will not induce a
spin up... anyway to test you need something that is on the verge of
needing real disk access. Memory almost full and then record till the
drive works. I am assuming the drive is only used for audio and no system
commands would touch it.
This drive should be used as a backup media only, but
I'm thinking to
buy an additional external hard drive for recording, to be able to visit
a Windows user (Mac became seldom here :), but to boot Linux from the
drive and to record on the drive.
Sounds like fun :) now the amount of ram in an unknown system comes into
play. Assuming you are taking a USB audio IF, then USB irqs have to be
looked at before deciding where to put the IF, USB stick and drive (DVD
might in this case be better than USB stick, though the USB sticks seem to
be more reliable). I personally have not had any problems a USB drive
being in a USB port that shares irqs while recording, but I can not say
for sure that a write or read was forced while I was recording.
--
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net
9 Mar
9 Mar
6:46 p.m.
New subject: External USB 2 HD for real-time recording
On Sat, 2013-03-09 at 09:00 -0800, Len Ovens wrote:
On Sat, March 9, 2013 4:30 am, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
Yes, there are several weak points. I e.g. would set up an install using
the vesa driver. RAM today usually isn't an issue, but the sound card
will be a serious issue. I'm thinking of some musicians who don't use
the computer for music them self. Modern PCs with Windows 8 with some
integrated audio device.
I only want to be able to play at least a stereo track (a temporary mix
of a production with much more tracks) and to record some tracks with
microphones for drums. Perhaps it's needed to use a mixer and to record
a stereo mix, I guess onboard surround devices can't record more than
stereo, especially in duplex mode.
It would be easy to at least visit one friend living close to me,
perhaps 1 km away, disconnecting and carrying the tower would be too
much work, but taking an USB drive, it would be an easy and short walk
only.
For my mobo I noticed that the default USB slots don't share IRQs. When
I bought the USB drive I also bought a sheet with two USB slots, since
there are 3 double-sockets for 6 additional USB slots. I bought a sheet
with 2 single jacks, instead of one double-jack. When I tested all the 6
additional ports, I noticed that 2 are free and 4 do share IRQs, 4 ports
I usually unbind. Perhaps vendors of mobos take care that the ports that
are available by default, seldom cause IRQ issues? FWIW, the 2
additional ports I can use are provided by one double-socket, so there
was no need to buy the sheet with 2 individual jacks (missing the
polarity protection a double-jack has got).
There's the possibility to use 4 + 6 USB ports, but to avoid a shared
IRQ with the RME card, I only have 4 + 2 ports.
If vendors are smart, they always put the ports that share an IRQ to the
by default unused ports on the mobos.
Regards,
Ralf
This drive should be used as a backup media only,
but I'm thinking to
buy an additional external hard drive for recording, to be able to visit
a Windows user (Mac became seldom here :), but to boot Linux from the
drive and to record on the drive.
Sounds like fun :) now the amount of ram in an unknown system comes into
play. Assuming you are taking a USB audio IF, then USB irqs have to be
looked at before deciding where to put the IF, USB stick and drive (DVD
might in this case be better than USB stick, though the USB sticks seem to
be more reliable). I personally have not had any problems a USB drive
being in a USB port that shares irqs while recording, but I can not say
for sure that a write or read was forced while I was recording.
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Ralf Mardorf