Subject: [ecasound] Simultaneous disk read & write
From: J. Gareth Williams (garethw_AT_qualis.com)
Date: Wed Nov 28 2001 - 23:35:39 EET
Hello all,
I was just partitioning a new disk for recording and playback, and it
got me thinking about how best to set up one's disks for an application
where you are reading and writing heavily to and from disk.
Let's say I'm playing back a file, while recording to another one. Is
there an advantage of using separate disks for reading and writing? I
can see two advantages:
1. I presume that IDE disks can only be given one DMA task at a time;
but with a separate read & write disk, each can be processing one
request at a time.
2. Head movement. If you're switching back and forth between reading
and writing, your disk head is going to be moving back and forth a great
deal between the two operations, resulting in a longer seek time. With
separate disks, consecutive reads (or writes) will tend to involve
shorter seek times, and therefore higher throughput.
Any comments? Are my simplistic notions simply wrong? :)
garethw
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Wed Nov 28 2001 - 23:25:56 EET