-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 02/19/2012 09:56 PM, Yosef Werner wrote: > Hi all, > > for testing reasons I've installed Arch-Linux on a second HD with 5400 rpm. > The recording and production is on the first HD with 7200 rpm, openSuSE > 10.2 and kernel-rt. After some work with Arch-Linux it seems that it could > be the next platform for the DAW. My question is if a HD-7200 rpm is also > necessary for the system to prevent x-runs? For sure, the HD-7200 rpm is > mounted for recording. > > Thanks for sharing your knowledge, > > Yosef Hi Yosef, I short: No. The system disk is completely irrelevant for audio-perfomance. Your system will start faster with a 7200rpm disk mounted on root compared to a 5200rpm drive of the same size but it has no impact on jack's performance. In fact the JACK x-runs are completely independent from any disk (even the disk where your audio-data resides). I/O is never done in the jack [real-time] context. The jack-application (ardour, qtractor, jack_capture,..) will stutter with with a message "Your disk is too slow!" if it can not read/write fast enough [and the memory-buffers/cache are full]. It won't however cause x-runs (other jack applications will meanwhile continue just fine). Generally, HDD seek-speed is not very important for reading/writing audio files. As Harry noted: most DAWs do buffer a few seconds of audio. A somewhat conservative value: HDD reads/write speed ~20 Mbytes/sec: 20 [MB/s] / 4 [bytes/sample] / 44100 [samples/second] = 118 [channels] That's the theoretical maximum; yet real values are close to that. You can measuere the speed and throughput of your disk width `hdparm - -t`; or simply by copying a file while watching `dstat -D sda,sdb`. HTH, robin -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAk9BkRUACgkQeVUk8U+VK0IQogCeISDoTjd5f3fKUBJXbplce+Nv zP8AoKRoLvt+Y9Vy2hEaA7X6cj88X9cZ =8TQU -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
