Recording on sata, ssd or scsi?

[mauser]

Hi everyone,

at the moment i'm recording on an amd x2 6000+ with 2x200GB IDE drives. One for the root fs and backup, the other one for ardour sessions. From time to time errors like "ardour was not fast enough .."
appear, and it seems that they appear if a lot of tracks have to be read from disk ( or if you scroll too fast ).
This error is very annoying, sometimes the whole sessions freezes and the current take vanishes in smoke and dust..

It came to my mind that the harddrive could be too slow. So my question is: What disks sit in your recording pc? And what is your experience with such errors?

[brummer]

morning mauser

I have get problems like that, when I plug in a new harddrive some time ago. Solution for me was the use of hdparm, like it is discribe here :
http://linux.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/linux ... dparm.html
unfortunately hdparm dont work with sata
maybe you could add noatime to the fstab for your drives ?

brummer

[Havoc]

How exactly are the discs set up? I assume you use the parallel IDE.
- are both discs on a different connector on the motherboard?
- are they set up as master/slave or cable select?
- are that fast discs?
- how much is "a lot of tracks"? (so people here could compare and see if it is normal or not)

As for the sata/ssd/scsci choice: if money was no issue I would be back to scsci. And they are hot and loud. But sata discs perform almost as good these days. You could try to switch to sata, making sure you get some fast sataII discs. If ultimate performance is the goal then a couple of discs in Raid0, but then you need to be careful about backup.

[mauser]

Hi,

@brummer: i'm gonna try the "noatime"-Option and measure the results with hdparm.

@havoc: Those disks are older Seagate discs, every has its own ide channel.
I can't say if they're configured via cable-select. Where's the difference? I would assume that this is only a point when they got detected. I'll have a look at the weekend (the pc is in our rehearsal room)..
The problems happen after recording something like 10 Tracks, but even below if you scroll to fast.

Hm yes i have thought about the a sata-raid, but i'm not sure about the speedup. I'm gonna look for some benchmarks and post it here if i find them..

[thorgal]

what is the rotation speed (RPM) of your disks ?
also, bear in mind that the IDE bus is slower than SATA. SATAII would be a good choice with at least 7200RPM disks.

[mauser]

Hi! Both are 7200rpm. I had a 4 hour recording session last sunday with only one crash (ardour segfaulted during automation changes). I've used "noatime" before and some smaller hdparm changes, so i suppose it did the trick! Thanks,everyone!