linuxaudio.org

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 10:42 PM, david  wrote:

quoted text
> Ivan K wrote:

>>

>> I was surprised to hear that so  many people write their audio

>> files to a second drive.  I always thought that most audio

>> people preferred as few drives as possible in a system to keep

>> noise down.

>>

>> On a somewhat related topic, is there a brand of SATA drive

>> that people recommend as far as reliability, speed, and low noise?

>> Also, even though Terabyte drives are inexpensive these days,

>> would a 500 GB drive be better as far as speed (reading/writing)

>> than a 1 TB drive?  (I really would not need a full TB anyways).

>

> I saw a 1TB drive for sale at NewEgg for . Does it matter if you don't

> need a full TB???

>

> Don't know about noise. There are "green" drive models that have a "reduced

> noise" setting, but I think it usually entails reducing the drive speed, I

> think.

>

> I don't think drive size has any impact on speed. Newer drives tend to be

> faster than the previous models, I think. Also, the larger drives may come

> with larger on-board caches.

>

> Largest drive I have here is 1TB (split into 2 500GB paritions), the only

> time I notice the size is when the system decides its time to fsck the

> drive. ;-)

>

> Brands? I like Hitachi and Western Digital. Toshiba for notebook drives.

> I've also had good results from IBM and Seagate. I've only had 2 drives fail

> on me. Both very old Seagates. The oldest failed after being used for about

> 10 years. The newer one died during its first year, was replaced under

> warranty, then died again about 18 months later.

>

> --

> David

I own 8 of the WD 1TB Green drives along with 5 WD 500GB RAID Edition

drives so I've seen this stuff up close over the last year..
A couple of points for consideration:
1) The Green drives do typically run at lower RPM. It's part of the

power saving strategy. I don't typically thing drive RPM has a huge

impact on audio work but clearly others could have a differing opinion

on that. It would make for an interesting conversation I think.
2) The biggest part of power saving on the WD Green drives is that

they park the heads _very_ often. While this hasn't been a big problem

under Windows for me under Linux it's a bit of an unknown at this

point. I have one system that uses one of the 1TB drives as the main

system drive. The head gets parked and then Linux wakes it up every 2

minutes or so. The issue is these drives are only spec'ed at 300,000

head parks over their lifetime and then they are out of spec.
30 parks per minute * 24 hours * 365 days = 262,800 head parks.
Basically, if the drive is left in a Linux system that's powered up

all the time then the drive is out of spec in a little over a year.
Does this matter? I don't know. I have one machine that is a year old

and it's approaching end-of-life?
3) One of the potential advantage I see with the larger density drives

is they are using 4K sector sizes instead of 512 byte. As long as you

partition on a 4K sector you only need to do one read of the drive to

get 4K vs 8 reads with older 512 byte drives. In my mind that's a big

potential win in terms of real speed independent of what the RPM of

the drive might be. For audio data where you have long streams of data

you aren't going to waste much disk space.
Please note that last time I looked the 4K drives don't identify them

selves as such so you have to know how to do the partitioning

correctly up front, keeping everything on a 4K boundary by hand. If

you don't these drives become __VERY, VERY, VERY__ slow.
Hope this helps,

Mark

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