Or should that be part III? I can't remember. Whatever. Let the saga continue. Several months ago, I posted here about my xrun problem. A brief refresher: MSI K7N2Delta mobo, Athlon XP2200+, 1Gb RAM, Adaptec 29160, Fujitsu 36Gb (MAN3367MP), Terratec EWS88MT, Matrox G550, linux-2.4.18-22, 2.6.[0-4]. With the invaluable help of various denizens of this list, I went through the list of possibilities from irq priorities to kernel patches to jack compile flags. Eventually somebody found an article about problems with the Adaptec 2940, and suggested I try an IDE drive. Which was about the only thing I hadn't done. In the meantime I've moved house, cut my hair, set a date for my wedding and bought a car. So it being a time for major life changes, today I went and bought an IDE drive - Seagate Barracuda 40Gb (ST340014A). Ordinary off-the-shelf nothing special. Not even serial-ata. Walked into a shop and said "Hello, I need to buy a 40Gb IDE drive". Walked out 10 minutes later. Previously I couldn't even run at -n 2 -p 1024 without a glitch every few seconds, unless I preloaded the .wav files for the ardour session to get them in cache. With the audio data (reiserfs) and the swap partition on the IDE drive I'm running jack at -n 2 -p 128 with ardour and 6-10 tracks and not an xrun in sight. I can play an *entire* session and not one xrun shows up. Woohoo! linux-2.6.3-mm2 FWIW, although jack got unhappy and kicked ardour off the graph when I added jamin and bounced the cpu to 75%. Not entirely unexpectedly. What burns is that I bought the SCSI setup specifically for audio. Could've saved quite a bit of money. Ah well. Maybe I can sell it or something. I spose I could try to get hold of a non-Adaptec SCSI controller, but it seems like more hassle than it's worth. Oh, and some hard performance numbers, disc0 is SCSI, disc1 is IDE: bash-2.05b# hdparm -Tt /dev/discs/disc0/disc /dev/discs/disc0/disc: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.34 seconds =375.42 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.31 seconds = 48.75 MB/sec bash-2.05b# hdparm -Tt /dev/discs/disc1/disc /dev/discs/disc1/disc: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.35 seconds =364.73 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.14 seconds = 56.05 MB/sec bye John
