Sampling Libraries and Hard Drive Performance?

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Sampling Libraries and Hard Drive Performance?

Hi,

I'm using many large and deep sampling libraries such as Ivory (24-bit), BFD, EWQLSO Platinum (24-bit)etc. They are quite hard on my system and I would like to increase the performance. I use a dual 2.0 GHz G5 with 4.5GB of RAM. It has one internal SATA 7200rpm drive for the system and one internal SATA 10000rpm drive for audio. The sample libraries currently reside on an external LaCie 1.6TB FW800 drive.

I'm planning to add two or more SATA II drives through a PCI-X card. These are my questions:

1. Should I make one Apple software RAID 0 configuration (two or three 500GB 7200rpm drives) for all the sample libraries or keep Ivory, BFD, EWQLSO and the rest of the huge sample libraries on several individual drives instead (possibly 74GB 10000rpm drives)?
2. Is there going to be a performance difference with regular SATA compared to the new SATA II drives?
3. Would it help to have each drive on a separate SATA controller card (not share the same bus?)?
4. Is there any advantage to have a new G5 that can use PCI-Express SATA II cards instead of PCI-X cards?
5. Is a 16MB HD buffer over an 8MB buffer going to make a difference?
6. Which drive configuration will load samples into RAM faster?

As I don't know how much benchmark tests and sales hype (SATA II, 16MB buffers etc.) makes a difference in the real world of audio, I would be grateful if you could share your real world experiences in this matter.

Thanks!
Patrick

PowerMac 2x2GHz, PowerBook G4 1.5GHz , P4 2.8GHz, AMD 2.2GHz, Mac OS X (10.4.2)

Posted on Nov 19, 2005 9:14 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Rohan Stevenson1

Level 4

3,183 points

Nov 19, 2005 10:04 AM in response to Patrick Schannong

i am not sure i am the best man to be answering this, but i have picked up a few things in my timeon the forum:

1-4

RAID is highly reccomended by ivory as signifcantly improving performance across several drives. the benchmark results are pretty conclusive on this.
using a SATA PCI controller card and a RAID array is going to give you heaps of performance. there those who say that RAID is not necessarily ideal for audio work where seek time is more important than data throughput. but the results that i have seen that RAID actually improves seek times - but do not claim to be an authority on this and if tBird answers here he will probably refute me.

so there are a couple of things to bear in mind. if you are streaming a great deal of continuous data seek time is not as critical as data through-put. if you are accessing 1000's of individual samples, the system my need seek time performance (ability to find the resources quickly). however, i know that ivory at least uses continuous samples. that is, all the samples are all joined together as one long sample and the "sampler" ie ivory sepeartes individual samples as regions. this is easier on the hard drive because because the sample is loaded in and just has to find the point at which it should play back.

the thing you might find with such vast libraries is that there will be a bottleneck somewhere. the fastest computer, with the fastest memory busses and SATA II ought to see you for the most part - but QLSO still think you should have four computers, one for each section of the orchestra. they do not believe that to use platinum properly you will stand any chance on only one of even the very fastest computer. and that is before you have started using other things. in this case the bottleneck is the processor as much as the HDs, and having the fastest hardrives is probably not going to solve many of your problems.

5. 16Mb buffer is much better. gives the drive a bit more time to find samples in a very complex directory.

6. again i think you need to find your bottleneck. i would guess that you could have 3 fast (10k) SATA drives on one controller with PCI-X before the PCI bus became a bottleneck. eventually, the CPU bus speed would become a bottleneck and having more drives or SATA controllers is not going to speed things up. or perhaps the RAM will become a bottle neck if it simply cannot load any more data into despite an abundance of supply.

there are a couple of people out there moebius and cyril blanc to name 2 who have massive systems. hopefully they will respond here in a day or 2. they may be able to tell you a bit more.

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Answer 2

Nov 19, 2005 2:15 PM in response to Rohan Stevenson1

Seek time is important but when you're talking about volume that you are you need a very fast drive and/or raid system. I use Ivory and Vienna Symphonic Library Here's my advice:

Consider 2 raid systems

1 Raid system will store your project files and audio files - why is this significant - because Logic will also store your freeze files with your projects on that system drive - freezing tracks gives you huge track count when running VSL and ivory.

2nd Raid system is of course for Ivory and other libraries. This one should ideally be the more powerful and larger of the two. I would put 4 drives on this system and 2 on the other.

At the very least you should have one completely seperate drive for your audio project/audio files/freeze files and one for your mac system and another for your ivory files, the just should not be on the same drives.

If you're really keen, buy one really fast ddrive ie 10,000 RPM JUST for ivory, 2 as a raid for your projects, and another 2 or 4 drives for your samples

Finally, HARDWARE RAID is far better than software raid. Remember, the more software raid systems you are running the higher the CPU overhead on your G5 which IS important for this kind of work. Hardware raid should minimise the drain on system resources for all these drives and give you the best performance. So a PCI card with dual bus on it would be great, two seperate raid systems running off that, plus your additional drive internally, or you could run two firewire 800 drives off a cheap PCI card with software raid as your project system. Lots of ways to do it, but anyway that's my 2c.

Miklos.

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Answer 3

Nov 19, 2005 7:12 PM in response to Patrick Schannong

I agree. If you want maximum performance, you want to put each sample library on a seperate 10k rpm SATA drive; each on a seperate channel. Now this isn't exactly cost effective or feasible. A hardware RAID of a couple drives (preferably 10k rpm) for all the sample libraries would probably be your best bet. This would give you amazing seek time as well as speed to get the samples loaded to ram.

A 2nd setup of 2 10k rpm drives in RAID would also be ideal for your audio scratch disk as well. Once you get into freezing a lot of audio tracks, you'd be surprised how fast you max out the drives (freeze tracks are 32 bit). The good thing about the audio drives is that they don't need to be very big. A project isn't going to use much over 5 or 10 GB max storage space.

SATA II will give you more headroom for future improvement but I doubt the actual hard drive can't read data fast enough to warrant more bandwidth. A 16 MB buffer is preferable, especially if you use 7200 rpm drives.

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