On Sat, March 9, 2013 4:30 am, Ralf Mardorf wrote: > an external hard drive does spin down too often for my taste. It's a > http://www.wdc.com/global/products/specs/?driveID=762&language=1 and I > wonder if there's a way to disable it. So far as i can tell mine doesn't, but then mine is a case I added a drive from an old laptop that stopped working. BTW this is not the drive itself but the USB board... Or if it is the in the drive itself, it would be the same if the drive was used internally. > Regarding to a German PDF SmartWare doesn't support this particular > external hard drive and even if it would, it seems to need Windows or OS > X. So all you need is to provide disk activity every 8 or nine minutes... sync or something. I am not sure but I don't know how bad sync is at grabbing system resources and if there are a lot of full buffers this could take some time to complete. > Is there a way to adjust this feature? I fear that spinning up and down > again and again, will reduce the lifetime of the drive significantly and > assumed I'll use it for recording, it might cause performance issues. I don't know if this would cause an early fail, but from the manufacturer's POV, so long as it is past warranty that is a good thing :P > Is it possible to use such drives for recording, without any risk? If I > would test it, I might not cover all worst case scenarios, think it > wouldn't cause issues and then be surprised if it fails in an > unfavorable moment. This is a hard issue, because I have 2.5G ram. My OS and all the apps I use for recording take up maybe about 1G (cause I was able to record when I only had 1G). So there is 1.5G worth of ram that can buffer data going to coming from disk. I might be able to record several tracks without ever touching the drive. So to test this you have to have enough tracks to fill ram buffers and force write to disk. Now when tracking, normally I am reading a bunch of tracks and only writing one or two. Reading takes less system resources than writing (I think... requires inode writes at least) so if the system is smart it will off load the reading first. Once it does that your drive will stay spinning, so the write part will not induce a spin up... anyway to test you need something that is on the verge of needing real disk access. Memory almost full and then record till the drive works. I am assuming the drive is only used for audio and no system commands would touch it. > This drive should be used as a backup media only, but I'm thinking to > buy an additional external hard drive for recording, to be able to visit > a Windows user (Mac became seldom here :), but to boot Linux from the > drive and to record on the drive. Sounds like fun :) now the amount of ram in an unknown system comes into play. Assuming you are taking a USB audio IF, then USB irqs have to be looked at before deciding where to put the IF, USB stick and drive (DVD might in this case be better than USB stick, though the USB sticks seem to be more reliable). I personally have not had any problems a USB drive being in a USB port that shares irqs while recording, but I can not say for sure that a write or read was forced while I was recording. -- Len Ovens www.OvenWerks.net _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
