[ardour-users] hard drive speed

[Geoffrey Wossum]

On Thursday 11 March 2004 11:57 am, Djamel Ouerdane wrote:

> I'm about to get a new computer. I read on ardour's webpage that a hard
> disk
> of at least 7200 rpm is required. Unfortunately, for some reasons, I
> could only get
> a disk of 4200 rpm.  Would it be a good idea to buy a faster external
> hard drive and use
> the USB 2  port for data transfer ?? I don't know much about all these
> things and I don't
> want to wait for an upgrade of my system (a Dell Latitude notebook).
> Thanks for any info.

I'm using Ardour with a Fujitsu laptop that has a 5400 RPM Toshiba hard drive, 
along with an RME Hammerfall DSP + Multiface.  I, too, was worried about the 
slow hard drive, but I've gone up to 14 simultaneous tracks so far without 
any issues.  Using a fairly low latency (usually either 2.9 or 5.8 ms).  One 
important foot note is that I'm usually recording at 44.1 kHz rather than 
some higher sample rate.  With the final media for me being CD, I can't tell 
that starting with a higher sample rate makes any difference once it gets 
downsampled for the CD.

The hard drive RPM really tends to affect the seek time more than the raw 
transfer rate.  So, the more fragmented your partition, the more the slower 
rotational speed hurts you.

---
Geoffrey