[PlanetCCRMA] disk performance

[Michael Curtis]

On Fri, 10 Aug 2007 04:14:14 John Dey wrote:

> Do these changes degrade disk recovery, if needed?  Does it make sense
> to have a special partition for real time work and apply these
> suggested options that that file leaving the other file alone?  Are
> other fs better for realtime, e.g reiser?  Any comments will be greatly
> appreciated.
Empirically, I've had good results with XFS.  I definitely noticed it with 
Ardour on my relatively slow system - having my recordings on ext3 caused 
Ardour to bail out often when seeking through the song (dragging the speed 
bar past about 2x would result in a "Disk not fast enough" message).  Moving 
them temporarily to an XFS partition on the same drive made the problems 
disappear - I couldn't break Ardour at that point, no matter how fast I wound 
it back and forward.

With XFS you should probably backup regularly, as it behaves poorly if there's 
a power failure (excessive in RAM caching, which is what makes it fast).  
Personally, I have never lost data and have all my mp3s on the partition, but 
power here is relatively stable and very rarely have an unclean shutdown.

Just my 2c

Michael