Thread: So you want to write music

I'm going to look into that Malevich, sounds really interesting and useful. Mate88- I found a great thread for you that talks a lot about the differences between drives. It's really apparent how differing peoples opinions are with this topic. As I said I really want other people to contribute any knowledge they have to the post and fill in my gaps. So again thanks for asking about that. Here is a fantastic link on hard drives people:
RAID vs SATA, SAS for DAW - Gearslutz.com

---------- Post added at 04:49 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:26 PM ----------

Just a quick note. Does anybody wish for me to make another tut in the future on anything? Or perhaps I can make a post with a huge amount of my favorite information resources so you guys can look into it all in your own time?

Thanks for the link though it made me only more confused. But I googled around over the internet for hours today trying to find information on how RAID0 will affect the latency/seek/access time. Looking through many forums and some scientific articles about the matter I got none the wiser as one source says one thing and another says something else with a lot of contradicting claims. Then I got an idea, I should only search for proofs of facts, not statements or opinions. So I did a search on HDD benchmarking and found out that there's a pretty good tool called HD Tune. Now the only thing left to find was a result of a test run with single hard drive and a test run with RAID0 of identical hard drives (the same hard drive as in the single hard drive test).
And here's a link I to such a test:
Samsung Spinpoint F4 various raid benchmarks - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net
With very small stripe sizes the latency will increase a bit compared to bigger sizes.
But as you can see, the access time of one Samsung F4 disk was actually higher than that of two F4 drives in RAID0. Going with 3 drives again would increase the access time but the difference is still under 1ms. The results also show us how ineffective RAID5 is.
And this is pretty much the result you would expect according to wikipedia:
Standard RAID levels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I searched for some more tests and found out that with sizes under 64KB the RAID0 solution could be slower by 1ms up to 25% in access time, depending on what controller was used. With stripe sizes of 64KB and above, the latencies tend to be the same or lower than that of a single drive.
It is also worth to note that even if the instrument consisted of very short sounds like staccatos (1 second or less) their size is about 200KB in 24-bit 44.1kHz format.
From this I conclude that using a RAID0 configuration won't cause any problems in disk streaming due to latency problems compared to a single drive solutions.
The increased performance in sustained read speeds is pretty much linear. If I use 2 drives in RAID0 I should get double the performance and with three it should be triple. Loading the samples from your hard drive into your RAM should be pretty much a sequential access so the increased speed here is welcomed.

Simply fantastic! Now that is dedication haha. I'm so glad you really looked into that issue, perhaps from now on we could call you 'the hard drive master' but on second thoughts that would allow for those out their with a dirty mind to get some bad impressions haha. So will you be going RAID0 now that you have the facts? I think it sounds like a great option/idea now that I see all the facts. Sample libraries and the like take an excruciating time to load and can make everything a little slow to respond. I would look at RAID0 down the track. I'm going to need to replace my iMac with a macbook pro soon though so I don't know how well RAID0 would work externally. If it did work del however...

Originally Posted by Insidious9

I would look at RAID0 down the track. I'm going to need to replace my iMac with a macbook pro soon though so I don't know how well RAID0 would work externally. If it did work del however...

Don't use anything external, it will beat the purpose of going to RAID0. Sure you can still get pretty much the same speed but with an external solution the delay will be well noticeable. It will do more harm than good in audio production. And when the hard drives don't keep up with the rest of the system you will have to set insane buffers to get it to work. A delay of 10ms is still somewhat playable, but going to 20ms and above would pretty much be the same as moving from your desktop computer to your laptop.