[ardour-users] DAW recommendations

[Maluvia]

>The type of interface between the harddrive and the chipset is not the
>bottleneck - it's the speed of the physical hard drive that's
>important. ATA133 is fast enough for any of todays consumer 7200 RPM
>hard drives.
>
>The speed the platters spin with and the areal density of the platters
>are the important factors. Todays standard is at 7200 RPM for consumer
>disks. The higher the areal density the more information the heads can
>read or write for one round. In the real world, this usually means that
>the disks that can store the most data have the highest areal density,
>and hence is the fastest (a 500 GB drive outperforms a 250 GB
>drive). Another factor is the number of platters in the drive. This
>usually varies from one in laptop disks up to four in desktop disks and
>more in fast server disks.
>
>As an example, in one of my computers I have two disks that spin at 7200
>RPM, one has a SATA interface and the other has a PATA interface. Which
>one is the fastest?  This will be the one with the highest areal
>density. In my case my PATA drive outperforms my SATA drive with about
>10 MB/s. This demonstrates that the interface is not the bottleneck.
>Regards,
>
>Lars Tobias

Thanks for that info, Lars - sounds consistent with our experience so far.
Ftr, we're currently recording on both a 74gb 10K raptor, (OS is on a
second raptor), and a 250 gb 7200rpm sata scratchpad drive.
The raptor seems to be outperforming the 250 gig drive somewhat, so maybe
between areal density and platter speed the platter speed has the edge?

>If you want really fast disks, go with large 15000 RPM SCSI disks, but
>they are expensive

I've heard they also run hot and rather noisy.

Is there some reason no one makes a 15K rpm pata or sata?
I can't seem to find a 10K pata either - is there a physical reason for
this?

- Maluvia