Performance for 64 bit hardware?

[dahnielson]

According to the specification:

OCZ Core Series SATA II 2.5" SSD
Available in 30GB, 60GB, 120GB capacities
Read: up to 143 MB/sec
Write: up to 93 MB/sec
Seek: <0.35ms

OCZ Core Series V2 SATA II 2.5" SSD
Available in 30GB, 60GB, 120GB, 250GB capacities
Read: up to 170 MB/sec
Write: up to 98 MB/sec
Seek: <0.2-0.3ms

It would obviously be interesting to see actual benchmarks. But the spec looks promising compared to the spec of my current sample drive:

Seagate SATA II Barracuda 7200.11 (32MB Cache)
500 GB capacity
Speedy performance at 105Mb/s sustained data rate
Average latency 4.16 msec
Random read seek time <8.5 msec
Random write seek time <9.5 msec

I just checked the prices on OCZ Core and they are not that expensive:

OCZ Core Series SATA II 2.5" SSD
30GB 1795 SEK
60GB 2495 SEK
120GB 4495 SEK

OCZ Core Series V2 SATA II 2.5" SSD
30GB 2195 SEK
60GB 2995 SEK
120GB 5295 SEK

The 60GB drive appears to be the current sweet spot. But I mean, even 30 GB can hold a pretty decent library for playback without buffering (assuming the <0.35 msec seek time is quick enough). After all my hardware sampler only got 32 MB and building a computer with 32 GB RAM is a lot more expensive than that.

What kind of seek time performance is required for unbuffered playback?

[dahnielson]

Wonder what kind of polyphony this might give you?

http://www.superssd.com/products/tera-ramsan/

[Eddy G]

Hi Benno,

Well, to be honest: this will be my first compile under Linux...
It will take some exercise.. and time ..
But I will try, and hope to come back on it!

Cheers, Eddy

[ccherrett]

I have 2 500GB SATA2 drives. Would it be advisable to say put my Strings and Percussions on one and Brass and Woodwinds on the other?

What are you doing Alex?

Thanks

[dahnielson]

I have 2 500GB SATA2 drives. Would it be advisable to say put my Strings and Percussions on one and Brass and Woodwinds on the other?

I'm not Alex, but I would say yes. Dividing instruments between hard drives is a good idea to get good performance when using a lot of instruments.

[ccherrett]

OK then I think I will divide my two drives into Strings and Percussion on one drive and Woodwinds and Brass on the other.

Thanks for the help.

P.S. So would solid state drives solve all these throughput concerns?

[dahnielson]

P.S. So would solid state drives solve all these throughput concerns?

Yes. But it's not throughput that's the problem. It is the random seek time.

A rule of thumb is that hard drives are only fast if you read and write to them sequentially, that's why video is stored in one big hunky file as a stream and not as individual frames even if no inter-frame compression is used. For random access it's better to use RAM. Solid states drives takes storage closer to the performance of RAM.

The way I understands it: This is important when streaming samples for the purpose of polyphony. Because you need to read a block of samples ("frames") here and another block of samples there to stream more than just one instrument sample. The jumping between those blocks for different instruments/samples require seeking. That is why you get better performance of having instruments that should play at the same time on different drives, and also why they should be kept on dedicated drives and not on the system disk (that the system processes will do a lot read/write/seek to).

[ccherrett]

OK cool!

I have two identical 500 GB SATA2 drives that are just for music and no system activity happens on. So I will try it out tonight.

Again Thanks!

[Alex]

Chris, i have two drives, split as follows:

Drive 1.

1st Violins
Cellos
Kontrabasses
Brass (including FH)
Male choir
Organs
Harp

Drive 2.
2nd Violins
Violas
Woodwinds
Tympani
Percussion
Piano
Female and mixed choirs.


I experimented with usage, according to my style of writing, and this provided a reasonable balance.

Worth experimenting to find out rough percentages of 'where you write the most'.

And my apologies to all for being missing in action these last few weeks. I've been hammering away trying to complete an album, and other related activities.


Alex.

[dahnielson]

And my apologies to all for being missing in action these last few weeks. I've been hammering away trying to complete an album, and other related activities.

That's a valid excuse.

I started to write some music. Then I grew frustrated with the programming of my strings and started reprogram them. Then I grew frustrated with the limitations of programming GIGs and started implementing SFZ...