On 17 December 2010 23:01, rosea.grammostola <rosea.grammostola@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Will performance be better if you have a special partition for audio? Yes and no. If this 'audio' partition is created with a filesystem suitable for handling a lot of medium-sized files (samples) and sometimes large ones (long recordings), then there is a little improvement. For eg. on Windows, NTFS with an allocation unit size of 64K, I/O can be more reliable since access is faster than going through 4K clusters. HFS+ can scale very well, so on a Mac I keep everything at that. On Linux, you may benefit equally using a filesystem such as ReiserFS, but don't quote me on this. Similarly, your /var can use XFS, and /home EXT4. I don't know how BTRFS scales - never used it. With all that said, the difference is still negligible. The only real improvement gained is from using a separate hard disk where you save your projects, and where your audio work files like samples are stored. Internal disks should definitely be superior, but external via USB/FireWire still helps. The reason is obvious; your disks spin independently. I don't like to partition myself because I see no real benefit. I just organise it in such a way that my 'system' partition remains independent from the 'data' partition. As such, I only allocate a small portion to the system, and the rest to the data. Currently on the laptop that I have, it's like: 60 GB - NTFS, default allocation, Windows system 128 GB - NTFS, 64K allocation, shared data 40 GB - EXT4, defaults, Linux system Don't mind the Windows, this is a borrowed machine. My own laptop had only 1 40GB system partition and the rest of the 320GB for data, both EXT4. I also like to symlink folders in $HOME from the data partition (even a ~/.bin with my personal executables), so essentially I do not use $HOME for permanent storage. I copy configs periodically to a UFD. I never reinstall my system so I don't particularly have any need for $HOME backups. Storing them on a UFD only serves the purpose of new installations on different machines. I recently got myself a WD Passport Elite 500GB, formatted it to NTFS w/ default allocation (because 64K causes hiccups on reads via USB from what I observe), and the r/w performance is great. -- GPG/PGP ID: B42DDCAD _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
