Yup. You have to watch out for SCSI. The article was on the Hoontech/ST Audio/SM Audio or whatever-they-are-this-week page. I wonder if SATA has similar problems to SCSI in terms of taking over the PCI bus. Jan On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 12:06, John Anderson wrote: > 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
