Dave Phillips wrote: > Mark Knecht wrote: > >> Mark Knecht wrote: >> <SNIP> >> >>> Well, obviously an 800MHz machine will at first glance seem >>> underpowered compared to all the newer stuff out there, but my >>> thought is that for just recording/playback you'll probably be fine >>> if you pay close attention to the rest of your hardware. >> >> >> >> I meant to include the comment that with an 800MHz machine you should >> not plan on using many, if any, plugins. > > > Ja, I kinda figured that... :( > > I can get a good deal on something not-state-of-the-art that would still > be much faster than my current box, so it's still a consideration. > Thanks especially for your recommendation re: hard-disk, I'll follow up > on that too. Btw, is there support for that disk in the 2.4 kernel > series ? I'm not planning a kernel upgrade at this time and would rather > avoid it right now. > > Best, > > dp > 1394 hard drives work pretty well for me under both the 2.4 Planet kernels and 2.6 Gentoo kernel. I have more trouble with CDRW/DVD drives which do not work well under either in my experience. This is probably not an issue for you. I do 1394 chips and software for a living so I try a lot of this out on my company's nickle. 1394 performance under Linux is not what it should/could be. The Linux 1394 stack doesn't optimize gap count automatically so throughput is slow. (Maybe 5-11MB/S?) I think there may be some little stand alone apps that will allow you to set the gap count by hand which would help. Humm...I just remembered that I had my main Pro Tools 1394 audio drive in my laptop bag so I plugged it in and ran hdparm to get some results. Better than I thought: root@flash ~ # hdparm -tT /dev/sda1 /dev/sda1: Timing buffer-cache reads: 1640 MB in 2.00 seconds = 818.49 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 56 MB in 3.15 seconds = 17.75 MB/sec Speeds are higher under Windows, but this isn't bad at all. root@flash ~ # uname -a Linux flash 2.6.8-gentoo-r2 #3 Fri Aug 27 11:05:03 PDT 2004 i686 Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.06GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux root@flash ~ # I don't have a 2.4 series kernel here to test with. My laptop's chipset doesn't work well under 2.4. Too new and many important things not supported. I don't remember how to extract the actual IDE drive parameters out of this 1394 drive case. I think the drive is a 7200RPM but it could be 5400. I don't remember and I'm sure anything you bought today would be faster. I've used this one for 18-24 months at least. The drive is set up with larger than normal (32K) cluster sizes and is a FAT drive so that I can use with both Pro Tools and other OS's as required. (Heck - I just did!) ;-) From dmesg: <SNIP> ieee1394: Host added: ID:BUS[0-00:1023] GUID[413f0200b723013d] ip1394: $Rev: 1224 $ Ben Collins <bcollins@xxxxxxxxxx> ip1394: eth1: IEEE-1394 IPv4 over 1394 Ethernet (fw-host0) eth0: link up, 10Mbps, half-duplex, lpa 0x0000 ieee1394: Node added: ID:BUS[0-01:1023] GUID[0001d20000030fc1] ieee1394: The root node is not cycle master capable; selecting a new root node and resetting... ieee1394: Node changed: 0-01:1023 -> 0-00:1023 ieee1394: Node changed: 0-00:1023 -> 0-01:1023 sbp2: $Rev: 1219 $ Ben Collins <bcollins@xxxxxxxxxx> scsi0 : SCSI emulation for IEEE-1394 SBP-2 Devices ieee1394: sbp2: Logged into SBP-2 device ieee1394: Node 0-00:1023: Max speed [S400] - Max payload [2048] Vendor: WDC WD40 Model: 0BB-32CXA0 Rev: Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 06 Attached scsi generic sg0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0, type 0 SCSI device sda: 78165360 512-byte hdwr sectors (40021 MB) sda: asking for cache data failed sda: assuming drive cache: write through /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 root@flash ~ # <SNIP> HTH, Mark
