[Mogens V.]

Arny Krueger wrote:
"Chel van Gennip" wrote in message
...

D C wrote:


7200 is the rule of thumb I've always heard.


RPM does not tell the story.


Agreed. It's an indicator, but not the whole story.

The only thing that matters is the transfer rate: MBytes/second.

That would be the effective transfer rate. One way to shoot transfer rate in
the foot is to have a second independent process that is putting seeks on
the drive. If your system has only 1 drive and is swapping heavily while
you are recording, then you are cruising for a bruising.


One channel at 24/48k will take about 0.15 MByte/second so a drive that
does 20MByte/second (and many 2.5" drives at 5400RPM or CF flash cards do
that or better) will support about 140 channels at that resolution.


Like you say, better. Transfer rates up in the 60 meg/second are not
uncommon with commodity drives.

For one contigious file, yes. Writing/reading to more locations in
smaller chunks can easily lower the effective transfer rate.
Anyone have refs to how much queuing mechanisms (today mostly SATA NCQ)
matters for a DAW? Preferably for separate system and data drives.

--
Kind regards,
Mogens V.