Do SCSI and Raptor drives increase the number of simultanious .wav playback?...

D

dubbyah

Limp Gawd
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Sep 12, 2005
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I am doing immense musical works which use a large amount of samples (in both .wav and mp3 format) playing all at the same time, and often my 7200 320GB Seagate SATA2 suffers disk overload. The drive has been benchmarked very well for it's type, and in some aspects, is comparable to a Raptor. My question regards to the speed, 7200 vs 15000 vs 10000. Would there be a difference in the amount of samples that I could play at once from the same drive, without suffering disk overload? The obvious downside with going SCSI would be the price to storage ratio. I can get 320 gigs with this Seagate for roughly 90 bucks, how much SCSI storage could I get with 90? (rhetorical).

Thanks.
 
Well assuming all the files you play at once aren't sequentially located on the hard drive the much quicker seek times of a Raptor or SCSI drive would be a benefit to you, so it's definately something for you to consider. The new 16MB cache Raptors are pretty damn fast and SCSI drives are expensive and hot.
 
Could you benefit from more RAM? If the application you are using allows for memory caching of these samples, more RAM would equate to less simulatneous HDD accesses in the future.

Another Option may be to use multiple HDDs and "evenly distribute" the sample thereby improving the number of simultaneous seeks that you can do.

It is quite likely that a drive with faster seek times will improve your performance.
 
RAID1 should be what your after or RAID0 (if you don't mind losing all your data if one drive dies)

If you get a RAID controller that is sufficiently intelligent then it should evenly distribute the reads across each drive in the mirror/stripe AND give you redundancy (except for RAID 0). You could add another 320GB or buy a pair of raptors. That should effectively double your read performance.

Writing will take a slight performance hit though.

The more drives, the faster the reads will be.

Riley
 
Raid 1 on a good controller. It'll be able to read from multiple disks at once, so you can have one disk service an Nth of the requests. The downside is you'll have to buy N times as much storage to get the same capacity. Raid 0 is unlikely to give the performance-doubling characteristic a good raid 1 will.

PS: What software, and how many tracks? With a relatively cheap set of disks (2 120GB seagate pata's) in raid 1 on a cheap controller, I got up to 32 tracks playback/6 tracks record (at the same time) with Nuendo. If there's a buffer option, crank it up, and buy more ram.

 
Once you load the files they are loaded into ram... You may benifit for more ram as stated earlier a lot more than what you got now.
 
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