Files on USB drive
Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2008 2:11 am
Probably a really stupid question but can I use LS with gig files on a USB2 thumb drive rather than on my HD?
Cheers
Graham
Cheers
Graham
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Re: Files on USB drive
Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2008 11:01 am
Depend on the USB 2.0 drive. The transfer protocol is fast enough, the question is if the drive can keep up with it.
Re: Files on USB drive
Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2008 1:30 pm
Thanks Anders.
That's about what I thought so I grabbed a cheap ($12) 512Mb drive. It performed flawlessly! My files total about 350Mb for this particular organ so I can avoid buying a new HD for now.
I'm loving this program!
Thanks to everyone involved.
Cheers
Graham
That's about what I thought so I grabbed a cheap ($12) 512Mb drive. It performed flawlessly! My files total about 350Mb for this particular organ so I can avoid buying a new HD for now.
I'm loving this program!
Thanks to everyone involved.
Cheers
Graham
Re: Files on USB drive
Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2008 5:03 pm
recent USB2.0 drives offer around 20MB/sec (high end drives do achieve 30MB/sec) read speed , 8-10MB/sec write speed
seek times are 0.5 - 1msec
the bottleneck has been traditionally the write speed but since LS does not perform any write operations during playback USB flash drives
are probably viable for not too large setups.
The advantage of faster seek times is that you can probably keep the sample preload size down thus allowing to load more instruments
compared with traditional HDs. The disadvantage of USB flash drives is the transfer rate, modern ATA HDs can achieve 60MB/sec and more.
so if you have lots of sustained notes the traditional HD will probably perform better.
give flash drives a couple of years (most promising are the solid state discs (SSD) with ATA interfaces as the have fatter databuses)
and the sampling world will switch over to them due to the low seek times.
And if the seek times will go down to 0.1 - 0.2 msec then it will be possible to stream and mix directly from SSDs without intermediate buffers.
This means you can access to hundreds of GB of samples as they were loaded in RAM without load times and without limits.
I guess Windows Vista will have troubles to guarantee low latencies in the file I/O routines but Linux will certainly be up to the task.
We are destined to return back to the "RAM based sampling era"
but with the difference of memory begin as cheap as HD space and no load times.
The algorithm behind buffer-less mixing is relatively simple so as soon as the SSDs become viable we can easily adapt LS to support this kind of sampling.
exciting days ahead for the sampling lovers
seek times are 0.5 - 1msec
the bottleneck has been traditionally the write speed but since LS does not perform any write operations during playback USB flash drives
are probably viable for not too large setups.
The advantage of faster seek times is that you can probably keep the sample preload size down thus allowing to load more instruments
compared with traditional HDs. The disadvantage of USB flash drives is the transfer rate, modern ATA HDs can achieve 60MB/sec and more.
so if you have lots of sustained notes the traditional HD will probably perform better.
give flash drives a couple of years (most promising are the solid state discs (SSD) with ATA interfaces as the have fatter databuses)
and the sampling world will switch over to them due to the low seek times.
And if the seek times will go down to 0.1 - 0.2 msec then it will be possible to stream and mix directly from SSDs without intermediate buffers.
This means you can access to hundreds of GB of samples as they were loaded in RAM without load times and without limits.
I guess Windows Vista will have troubles to guarantee low latencies in the file I/O routines but Linux will certainly be up to the task.
We are destined to return back to the "RAM based sampling era"
but with the difference of memory begin as cheap as HD space and no load times.The algorithm behind buffer-less mixing is relatively simple so as soon as the SSDs become viable we can easily adapt LS to support this kind of sampling.
exciting days ahead for the sampling lovers