Re: [linux-audio-user] The trouble with disks, part II

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Subject: Re: [linux-audio-user] The trouble with disks, part II
From: Jan Depner (eviltwin69_AT_cableone.net)
Date: Wed Mar 24 2004 - 00:09:33 EET


Yup. You have to watch out for SCSI. The article was on the
Hoontech/ST Audio/SM Audio or whatever-they-are-this-week page. I
wonder if SATA has similar problems to SCSI in terms of taking over the
PCI bus.

Jan

On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 12:06, John Anderson wrote:
> Or should that be part III? I can't remember. Whatever. Let the saga
> continue.
>
> Several months ago, I posted here about my xrun problem. A brief
> refresher: MSI K7N2Delta mobo, Athlon XP2200+, 1Gb RAM, Adaptec 29160,
> Fujitsu 36Gb (MAN3367MP), Terratec EWS88MT, Matrox G550,
> linux-2.4.18-22, 2.6.[0-4]. With the invaluable help of various denizens
> of this list, I went through the list of possibilities from irq
> priorities to kernel patches to jack compile flags. Eventually somebody
> found an article about problems with the Adaptec 2940, and suggested I
> try an IDE drive. Which was about the only thing I hadn't done.
>
> In the meantime I've moved house, cut my hair, set a date for my wedding
> and bought a car. So it being a time for major life changes, today I
> went and bought an IDE drive - Seagate Barracuda 40Gb (ST340014A).
> Ordinary off-the-shelf nothing special. Not even serial-ata. Walked into
> a shop and said "Hello, I need to buy a 40Gb IDE drive". Walked out 10
> minutes later.
>
> Previously I couldn't even run at -n 2 -p 1024 without a glitch every
> few seconds, unless I preloaded the .wav files for the ardour session to
> get them in cache.
>
> With the audio data (reiserfs) and the swap partition on the IDE drive
> I'm running jack at -n 2 -p 128 with ardour and 6-10 tracks and not an
> xrun in sight. I can play an *entire* session and not one xrun shows up.
> Woohoo! linux-2.6.3-mm2 FWIW, although jack got unhappy and kicked
> ardour off the graph when I added jamin and bounced the cpu to 75%. Not
> entirely unexpectedly.
>
> What burns is that I bought the SCSI setup specifically for audio.
> Could've saved quite a bit of money. Ah well. Maybe I can sell it or
> something. I spose I could try to get hold of a non-Adaptec SCSI
> controller, but it seems like more hassle than it's worth.
>
> Oh, and some hard performance numbers, disc0 is SCSI, disc1 is IDE:
>
> bash-2.05b# hdparm -Tt /dev/discs/disc0/disc
>
> /dev/discs/disc0/disc:
> Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.34 seconds =375.42 MB/sec
> Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.31 seconds = 48.75 MB/sec
>
>
> bash-2.05b# hdparm -Tt /dev/discs/disc1/disc
>
> /dev/discs/disc1/disc:
> Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.35 seconds =364.73 MB/sec
> Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.14 seconds = 56.05 MB/sec
>
> bye
> John


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