[ardour-users] Ardour DAW - Hardware advice please..

[Florian Schmidt]

On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 07:00:23 -0500
Joe Hartley <jh at brainiac.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 12:33:36 +0100
> "Happyface" <happyface at happyface.dk> wrote:
> 
> > 2. Would I gain much performance in using some kind of RAID system for the harddrives ?
> 
> This is the only part of this I can really comment on:  no, you won't
> get any performance boost from a RAID.  RAIDs help protect data, but
> cannot write it any faster than with a single drive, and in some cases
> a RAID will slow you down because it'll spread the data across multiple
> drives, and there's overhead involved in doing so.
> 
> To protect my sessions, I have a process to rsync my /tape directory off
> to my server at 4:00 AM nightly.  That's saved me at least once!

Huh?

There are different RAID types. There's some to increase redundancy and
some to increase performance. Let's take a look a 2 disks not used for
redundancy but for performance. Since the pci bus is not the bottleneck
with a single drive, but the drive itself, it does make sense to
write/read to more than one drive in parallel until the pci bus becomes
the bottleneck. And of course the speed increase holds for both write
and read operations.

2 Disks.

need to write 10meg of data

each disk has a throughput oof let's say 5meg/s

writing the 10 megs to a single of the two disks takes 2s. 

writing 5megs to the one disk and 5meg to the other will complete the
operation in 1s. Performance increase. For this performance increase one
pays the price of less redundancy though (instead of the chance of one
disk failing you got the chance of each one of both disks failing
combined).

Flo

Flo

-- 
Palimm Palimm!
http://affenbande.org/~tapas/