2 MB a large enough buffer for external hard drive?

[minofifa]

i just bought an external hard drive for use with recording on my laptop. I just noticed that the buffer size on it is only 2 MB. Is this going to be enough or should i get something larger? it is a LaCie 160 GB USB 2.0 hard drive (7200 RPM)

for those who don't do much audio produciton, it iwll need to be able to "stream" (if thats the right terminology) at least 24 tracks of uncompressed audio at once. I know that the RPm is important, in that 7200 is a minimum. i havn't heard much about a minimum buffer size.

 

[HiME]

2MB cache? it makes me feel like it's an old hard drive, maybe you can check and see how old is that hard drive or manufacture date.

what i think is try and get a hard drive with 8MB cache, most of them carries it, 8MB cache should help a bit for streaming files

i had been using a e-mac, streaming with lots of tracks using garageband. it's equipped with a WD hard drive and i found no problems with it.
by the way, is your laptop really that fast to fully take down the hard drive? you could be CPU limited

 

[MAW1082]

ram will be more important.

all the files will be loaded from the hard drive into system memory. it's not necessarily going to do it at a constant rate wither. it will most likely load most of the files to ram. think about it for a second. it's not going to be abe to simultaneoslyread data from 24 different tracks at once. it has to cache it somewhere. 24 at once with a 2 mb buffer leaves < .1 MB per song. .4 MB for a 8 mb buffer. RAM RAM RAM RAM

 

[Luckyboy1]

Unless you've got a firewire connection to hook it up to, anything more than 2 MB's would be a waste and of course, the RAM would be needed as well.

 

[imported_rod]

On an external HDD, the cache won't matter much (due to the speed limit of USB/Firewire). And for streaming audio, buffer won't matter much, since it's not accessing the same data very often.

Basically, a HDD with an 8MB or 16MB buffer may perform slightly better, but the speed difference will only be quite small.

RoD

 

[minofifa]

ok thanks for the advice.

the guy at the shop told me that usb2.0 is faster than firewire so i don't understand the comment about having firewire or not. i haven't opened teh box yet, but it seems like it will do the job. thanks

 

[Jiggz]

Originally posted by: minofifa
ok thanks for the advice.

the guy at the shop told me that usb2.0 is faster than firewire so i don't understand the comment about having firewire or not. i haven't opened teh box yet, but it seems like it will do the job. thanks

Well if you ask the vendor which one is faster, of course, he will tell you the one he is selling you is the faster one! But in reality, firewire either "a" or "b" series is faster then USB 2.0. Theoretically, USB 2.0 is faster but also uses more CPU resources than FW. Not to mention bandwidth is shared among additional USB devices which makes is slower. Of course, this is just FYI.

 

[soccerballtux]

LOL USB faster than Firewire. Firewire is much better than USB. Theoretically USB is faster, but in actual use, Firewire is a ton better.


On a side note, why don't harddrives have a slot to plug in an extra stick of ram? I've got 256MB sticks of RAM lying around that have been screaming at me for months to be used as cache in my harddrive.

 

[batmanuel]

USB2 is theoretically faster that FW400, but when it comes to doing video or audio work the Firewire connection is better because of it supports an isosynchronous data transfer mode that allows for much smoother streaming of audio and video. That's one of the big reasons that FW is still used to connect digital camcorders to computers (and why Apple makes FW standard on all of their computers).

 

[imported_rod]

Although Firewire is faster than USB 2.0, USB2.0 is still fine for what you want. USB2.0 is actually fast enough that I can play Red Alert 2 of my thumb drive (😉 -I was bored at Uni).

RoD

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: soccerballtux
On a side note, why don't harddrives have a slot to plug in an extra stick of ram? I've got 256MB sticks of RAM lying around that have been screaming at me for months to be used as cache in my harddrive.

Because building a DRAM controller into your hard drive would be expensive and impractical. It would be more effective to just put the extra RAM in your system and use it as general filesystem cache.

Also, you could only use it as a read buffer, since you can't leave hundreds of megs of potentially unwritten data sitting there -- a power outage would shred your hard drive. "RAM Drives" that use large amounts of volatile memory backed by a hard disk have to have battery backups so the drives can save all the data to disk if the power goes out.

Several companies are working on drives using bigger nonvolatile (probably flash-based) caches. Should be out in the next few years; Vista is supposed to be able to optimize for them.