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Q for Jim Roseberry and others - Cores v RAID


craigb

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Was just reading the Ryzen thread and the following question popped into my head.  For recording audio with several tracks recording and/or playing back at higher resolutions (say 24/96 for sake of example), and, for fun, let's include a bunch of audio mangling (your choice, compression, pitch shifting, modulation, whatever), what do you think would be more useful?

  • More cores (i.e., off-loading the processing to multiple cores)
  • RAID striping (i.e., speeding up the writing of LOTS of data by striping to multiple drives)

Sure, BOTH is the best answer, but I was just toying with the idea for kicks and giggles.

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I would assume that striping with RAID for speed is made redundant by the high performance of modern SSD drives.

I remember seeing the formula somewhere on the net for calculating how many tracks at a specified resolution you could run with a given disk throughput.

For the average Joe, a 7200 RPM SATA III is probably fast enough.

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1.  Clock-speed

2. Cores

 

Your disk speed will determine the number of simultaneous tracks you can run.

If you're working at 44.1k or 48k, a conventional HD can sustain over 100 solid/contiguous tracks.

IOW, It's probably not much of a limitation.  ?

 

If you're working at 192k, you'll want the extra speed of SSD.

As a point of reference:

  • Conventional HD sustains ~200MB/Sec
  • SATA SSD sustains ~540MB/Sec
  • M.2 Ultra SSD sustains ~3500MB/Sec

 

With SATA SSD and M.2 Ultra SSD, we don't configure many RAID setups these days.

Last RAID setup we did was for a client who was using EWSO (allowed only a single drive location for the entire library).

This client needed heavy disk-streaming polyphony... so we put a pair of SATA SSDs in RAID-0.

Net result was a single drive location... that sustained ~1000MB/Sec.

Keep in mind that M.2 Ultra SSDs (using four PCIe lanes) weren't available at that time.

Edited by Jim Roseberry
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