G'day Doc, Adding another disk to a system on which you are slowly running out of space just makes the problem worse. You end up with double the amount of stuff to clean up. A USB hard disk *may* be sufficient for you, but it will depend on a few factors; 1. what data rate you can sustain from the CPU to the disk, You can measure the data rate using the badblocks command, or by copying various sized files followed by a sync command. On one of my old USB 2.0 disks, I can generally get 30MByte/sec. The modern ones are probably faster. Using a journalled filesystem *might* slow things down, but you get a bit more reliability overall. The trick is to test it out. 2. what data rate you need at 16 tracks, Of course this depends on your sampling rate. 16 tracks of raw audio at 16-bits stereo at, say, 48000Hz sample rate, means 16 x 16 x 2 x 48000 bits per second, which is 3MByte/sec. Well within my old USB 2.0 disk bandwidth. 3. whether the USB is shared with other active devices transferring data. If the same USB controller is *also* being used by your audio device, or some other device involved in the whole situation, then the total bandwidth may be reduced by that. When testing, use the other USB devices to see if they impact the data rate. Not all USB devices work correctly. Another idea ... if you have a network card, consider a consumer network storage device. Data rate to a network card is generally more efficient, though it does depend on the card. ;-} Hope that helps. -- James Cameron mailto:quozl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://quozl.netrek.org/ _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user
