[PlanetCCRMA] Re: Fedora 7 and Partitioning to prepare for CCRMA releases

[Rohan]

On Thu, Jun 07, 2007 at 11:07:42PM -0400, Vivek Ayer wrote:
> Thanks for the advice. Well, I don't know what speed my internal runs
> at. You could be correct about that. The external HD runs at 5400
> which is considerably faster than 4500, so do you recommend that I do
> all my recording on there and keep my apps installed on the internal
> HD? Granted HD speed is more important than filesystems, still what
> filesystems would you recommend? You seem to like ext3, but I've heard
> XFS performs better.
> 
> For basic audio capturing in Audacity, I think it records a long track
> chunk by chunk and stores the recording scratch as many small files,
> which would suggest that it uses reiserfs. Still I'm not sure, but I'm
> researching about it. Thanks for your help.

Vivek,

By 'many small files' the developers are talking about something like a 
maildir based mail system, with 1000's of 4-10k files.  Any audio work is
going to have 'large' files (from a filesystem perspective).

I'll concur with the others who've suggested that you should focus on the
potential hardware bottlenecks before getting bogged down with the small
gains you may get tweaking filesystems.  (are you SURE your external hard
drive is using full speed USB (or firewire), or is there a chance it's
running at USB 1.1 speeds ?).

I haven't used XFS for Audio work (but have had success with ext3), the
truth is for raw write-speed performance the simpler the filesystem the
better the results .. simple things like using large blocks (4k) and
consider turning OFF journalling  and use system level partitioning (not
LVM) may give you a far greater performance boost than trying complex
fs types like Reiser.

Rohan 

> Vivek
> 
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