Re: Memory, Speed, and SSDs in DAWs

Frank Stearns wrote:

I've got an Intel quad-core machine with 3 Gbytes of RAM running XP
Pro, and recently moved to Protools 8.

Hmmm .... that should be able to haul plenty.

I'm beginning to see some performance hits (1.4 Gbytes of pagefile
use, for example). The system works fine, it's just "sticky"
(probably because of the paging) which is annoying.

If you go by the task managers info, then it says "pagefile use" when it
means committed memory".

I have no problem adding more memory, but the motherboard manual
informs me that 32-bit XP can't address more than 3 GBytes of RAM
anyway and will ignore anything more than 3.

That is correct. I'm right now taking a new daw in use, a second hand HP
ML115 with dual core opteron and same amount of ram. I'll probably rebuild
it later tonight, because I got the disk setup wrong. It came with 4 -
assumed server grade - disks configured in raid5, and I kinda like that, but
it is the mobo raid5 and at best I get 6 megabytes pr. second writes, I
think I'll take the gamble and split them into two simple stripe sets and
save to an external disk and protect the installation via imaging.

I'm not inclined at this point to mess with a *very* stable OS
installation by changing the OS. (Oh, I'm sure XP-64 works great --
except for numerous to-be-discovered gotchas. Don't really want to go
there just yet.)

Check driver availability, it's probably gonna be faster.

So I've been looking at SSDs for the system drive (or perhaps a
dedicated page file drive, as we used to do in the olden days for
performance increases).

Disable pagefile and wait and see. You may not need to do anything else.

I've satisfied that the manufacturers (particularly Intel) have
addressed the "wear" problem with write cycles in SSDs, but have seen
mixed reviews about speed increases over a modern SATA II
conventional HD.

Frank, you need to tell us how you work with that box, is it for multitrack
work?

Anybody been messing with SSDs for DAW use? Dramatic speed increases?

I have not followed this intensely, I think they still have a speed issue.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts,

Simple system optimisation: have multiple sets of spindles so that you never
read and write to the same set of spindles, that gives you a relative speed
increase of about 4 times. If you need a pagefil, then distribute it over
all other sets of spindles than the one the OS is residing on. With 2
gigabyte ram or more: disable pagefile and only enable it if it gets
requsted. With 3 gigabytes of ram having one gets pointless if you run only
one application on a 32 bit box. Here is why: the application gets a 4
gigabyte address table to use, half of that is for chatting with the OS and
the other half is for the aspplication and its datacaches.

I tried a demo version of 64 bit server 2003 on that box, way faster than
XP, but I have an XP prof I bought for having on the shelf if I needed one,
and the server OS is darn costly. To really move to 64 bit computing you'd
also need a 64 bit version of the application. Interestingly Server2003 64
bit was completely happy with the midiman drivers for the duo that I'm gonna
use with that box ....

Such a server-box is not designed for use with a physical display ... its on
board graphics are rudimentary but its mobo design is designed for moving
data, and as I do a lot of my AA3 work in the edit window it seems to be an
attractive choice. The current version would be a ML110G5. It is great to be
able to open a remote application with a lot of hardware power from a petite
laptop and allows good listening conditions.

We do have this great pcdaw list on yahoo, hosted by Geoff.

Frank
Mobile Audio

Kind regards

Peter Larsen



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