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

[Joe Hartley]

On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 14:40:02 +0100
Florian Schmidt <mista.tapas at gmx.net> wrote:

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

Ah, you're right, I did forget about this type of RAID.  As my son
would say, "My bad."

This is rarely seen in the wild for the very reasons you note:  no
redundancy and a higher chance of getting burned by disk failure.

I've recorded 8 tracks to disk at once on a 1GB PIII with no problems;
disk I/O rarely seems to be an issue if the drives have been tuned with
hdparm.  No idea how 16 channels would work, though.

-- 
======================================================================
       Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh at brainiac.com
Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa