[ardour-users] best file system for audio

[Mark Knecht]

On 1/19/06, Bengt Gördén <bengan at sunet.se> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 08:17:17PM -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
> >
> > It's not RAID. It's a multiple 1394 disk set up that only works with
> > Ardour. Ardour decides which audio files go to which drives and
> > attempts to spread out the disk I/O over the three drives.
>
> Ah. Ok. Understood.
>
>
> > I wouldn't know how to run bonnie++ on that.....
>
> Me neither :-)
>
>
> > I have played a bit with stuff like hdparm -tT running on all three
> > drives at the same time and seen that I get a lot more throughput than
> > I get to any single drive. I have 2 1394a drives on one controlelr and
> > 1 1394b drive on a separate controller.
>
> It still sounds like a very nice idea. I think I'll adopt it. We have
> some spare disks and 1394 controllers at work that I can test with
> before I go ahead and buy something.
>
> regards,
>

I haven't had the money to work on this, nor do I know of the right
controllers, but the newer PCI-Express motherboards are coming with a
16x socket for the VGA and 2-3 1x slots for future expansion. I expect
that a couple of 1394 1x PCI-E cards would be even better than doing
this on a 33MHz PCI bus.

The future is bright I think.

Have fun. If you are truly limited by disk I/O (I was a bit) then this
will help with that.

NOTE: One complication to doing this is that Ardour provide NO
automatic way to back up sessions, much less ones that are spread
around on different file systems. Since you will now have files spread
around YOU are responsible for collecting those together for backups,
as well as sprinkling them around when doing a session restore. A
great area for Ardour to look at in the future would be to do this for
us. I'd like to back all files in multiple session directories up to
DVD media. It would be very cool for this to be made error free.

- Mark