Subject: Re: [linux-audio-user] Submitted for your approval
From: R Parker (rtp405_AT_yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Apr 06 2003 - 03:13:28 EEST
Hi,
--- "Jan \"Evil Twin\" Depner"
<eviltwin69_AT_cableone.net> wrote:
> I agree with Steve, I wouldn't use RAID for the
> data. Put OS and swap
> on the first drive and use the other two for audio
> data only. There's
> the signpost up ahead... you're about to enter the
> Linux audio zone.
>
> Jan
These are an interesting set of opinions that I don't
agree with. Well, I do agree when reguarding the
original writers design requirements. I'm an advocate
of scsi hardware raid but only for professional
installations because IMO it's overkill and to
expensive for individual work stations.
Here's my "active" client count:
stepdaddy bin # ls /home/studio/clients/ |wc -l
35
Here's the data amount for that client array:
/dev/sdc1 109GB 79GB 25GB 76% /raid5
Everyone of those 35 clients pays my partners and I to
produce their music. There's probably an average of
eight songs in each of those 35 client directories and
an average of 16 audio tracks per song. I'd guess that
each keeper track takes about an hour to produce.
There are to many examples of musicians that have
their personal best performance which they'll have a
difficult time reproducing. My standard for data
management is that under no circumstances can I ever
lose any data. The scsi hardware raid gives us
hardware redundancy with raid 5.
We run three production rooms that symoultaneously
share the client array. Two of the rooms are fairly
low bandwidth; mastering--stereo images,
preproduction--midi and sequencing. The third room is
doing multiple mono audio channel printing and mixing.
The multiple mono mixing done with the Macs is via
100mb LAN. Otherwise most work in that room is via
lightpipe. In addition to audio production bandwidth
usage we run rsync over LAN and we're adding video
production.
I know how more than a few studios conduct their
affairs. One example is a friend who during the last
year lost the production of an entire album and within
a month of that incident lost a 120gig drive that was
full of personal artwork and songs. The guy is a
prolific pianist and song writer. All songs gone!
Studios that manage their affairs this way will never
do any important work for me.
I'm not saying that my way of doing things is the only
way and everyone else is wrong. If I required a
personal workstation, I'd wholeheartidly follow the
consensus of this thread. But my circumstances require
that I look at 35 sets of artists and think about the
quality of their performances not whether or not I can
find their data, will the equipment perform and if I
screw up then two business partners are gonna have to
find jobs while we repay the debts to our clients.
I'm not sure how I'd manage the volume of production
that we do within any 24 hour period without hardware
scsi raid. And I don't care because anything else
would be penny wise but dollar foolish. I also don't
know anything about latency with raid. Perhaps it
applies only to kernel controled software raid. Ardour
includes a local/native raid 0 implementation that
shouldn't experience any computational latency.
Anyway I'm filing my disagreement with at least two
people who's opinions I absolutely respect...I, I, I,
gotta duck and cringe. :) Guys, with my requirements,
could it be done better and for less money? It's not
like I enjoy looking at a four unit rack that cost me
around $3,000.00 USD for HDDs and power. When looked
at from a cost perspective, it irratates the hell out
me.
ron
> On Sat, 2003-04-05 at 09:05, Steve Harris wrote:
> > On Sat, Apr 05, 2003 at 09:26:44 -0500, Chris
> wrote:
> > > Maxtor 7200 8megbuffer 80 gb hardrives (2 Will
> be done in IDE RAID)
> >
> > I recommend Seagate Barracuda IV's, very quiet. I
> wouldn't use RAID for
> > audio, and especially not hardware IDE RAID - lots
> of people at work have
> > had volumes wiped out by dodgy hardware IDE RIAD
> controllers (even
> > reputable ones) and if your card goes pop getting
> the data back can be very
> > hard.
> >
> > Someone (possibly Mark K.) posted bad experiences
> with RAID and latency
> > too. I only use it for situations where throughput
> is important (eg.
> > database servers), for audio its not a big deal.
> 32 channels of 32bit
> > audio is only 5MB/s, any current disk can do that
> without breaking sweat,
> > random link:
> >
>
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20030402/250_gb-04.html#data_transfer_diagram
> >
> > > lastly: Does anyone know if the Zahlman
> CNPS7000-cu will work on an Athlon
> > > XP chip? Everything I saw only mentioned a P4
> or a Clawhammer chip. I
> >
> > I'm using a 6000-cu FWIW, its fine, but you have
> to run the fan, at
> > minimum speed it pretty quiet though.
> >
> > - Steve
>
>
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