Hardware upgrade
Posted: Wed Dec 20, 2006 12:16 pm
Time is ripe for hardware upgrade here, and some reflections about could be very usefull indeed.
From the reading of previous topics it comes out that Conroe CPUs and Intel 965 chipset are used whitout problems for CW boards based DAWs.
Since one of the needs moving me to upgrade is a quieter/cooler machine, the high power absorbtion of the Conroe is however source of some doubt for me. So i'm wondering if Core2 CPUs (though still quite expensive), as well as hi-freq FSB mobo, have been successfully tested with Scope.
Moreover it's not yet clear for me if i really can expect a valuable increase of performances using state of the art dual/multi core CPU for native audio apps.
The second point i'd like to discuss is about HDDs.
Trying to find out the concrete transfer rate needs for a DAW, i ventured some calculation.
I can see a single PCM 16 bit 44.1 KHz track contains something around 86 KB x sec.
It follows that 24 simultaneous tracks would produce a data flow around 2.1 MB/sec. Looks like every HDD can do that..? Just buffer size and seek times can make the difference..?
I've at the moment 2 HDDs with a tranfer rate of 40 MB/s, cache 8 MB, so i've 3 alternatives:
- don't upgrade HDDs
- replace one of that with a faster/well buffered one
- coupling the two disks in a RAID0 stripe, adding a third disk for the OS.
Considering each disk requires some CPU resources, RAID stripe could be a wrong choice. For sure it bring no advantages in the seek time range.
Even though buffer size would be doubled, without a dedicated PCI controller it definitely could prove a waste of resources (and even PCI resources have to be well managed).
But, in the need of tracks number and audio resolution increase, i absolutely can't figure out if more calculation power is enough without better file system performances.
Going for a new disk, WD Raptors still seems to have the best performances, but i'm wondering about later SATA II devices.
Advices and considerations from any of you that is dealing or has dealed with this kind of issues are really welcome.
From the reading of previous topics it comes out that Conroe CPUs and Intel 965 chipset are used whitout problems for CW boards based DAWs.
Since one of the needs moving me to upgrade is a quieter/cooler machine, the high power absorbtion of the Conroe is however source of some doubt for me. So i'm wondering if Core2 CPUs (though still quite expensive), as well as hi-freq FSB mobo, have been successfully tested with Scope.
Moreover it's not yet clear for me if i really can expect a valuable increase of performances using state of the art dual/multi core CPU for native audio apps.
The second point i'd like to discuss is about HDDs.
Trying to find out the concrete transfer rate needs for a DAW, i ventured some calculation.
I can see a single PCM 16 bit 44.1 KHz track contains something around 86 KB x sec.
It follows that 24 simultaneous tracks would produce a data flow around 2.1 MB/sec. Looks like every HDD can do that..? Just buffer size and seek times can make the difference..?
I've at the moment 2 HDDs with a tranfer rate of 40 MB/s, cache 8 MB, so i've 3 alternatives:
- don't upgrade HDDs
- replace one of that with a faster/well buffered one
- coupling the two disks in a RAID0 stripe, adding a third disk for the OS.
Considering each disk requires some CPU resources, RAID stripe could be a wrong choice. For sure it bring no advantages in the seek time range.
Even though buffer size would be doubled, without a dedicated PCI controller it definitely could prove a waste of resources (and even PCI resources have to be well managed).
But, in the need of tracks number and audio resolution increase, i absolutely can't figure out if more calculation power is enough without better file system performances.
Going for a new disk, WD Raptors still seems to have the best performances, but i'm wondering about later SATA II devices.
Advices and considerations from any of you that is dealing or has dealed with this kind of issues are really welcome.
