Track Counts with a single 7200 rpm HD

K

KaosTheory

New member
On the ProRec site,
I read in an article called "Roll Your Own Thunderbird" by Pete Leoni that he could 100 tracks of 24 bit audio to playback simultaneously.

I don't know about any of you, but that only happens in my dreams. I am lucky to get 10 tracks of 24 bit audio to playback.

My system:
WinME
Vegas Audio
Athlon 1 ghz
Asus A7V mobo
Delta 1010 and Delta 66
7200 rpm IBM ATA100

Is he yanking my twinkie or do I have something set up wrong?
 
I don't know about 100 tracks but I routinely get 30 to 35 tracks of 24 bit, 48KHz audio running on a 700 MHz P III coppermine with 512 megs of RAM on a 7200 RPM drive. Obviously plug ins can skew that number significantly.
 
When I used a Celeron 333 with 128 meg RAM it would choke if I tried to record 8 tracks of 24 bit at once. It would play back 20 with no problem.

After upgrading to a PIII 533, 512 meg RAM, I have yet to make it choke. However I still have not gone over 20 tracks total of audio.

Unless recording an orchestra, I can't imagine using 35 tracks, let alone 100.
 
Kaos, if you are only getting 10 tracks, you must be using ALOT of plugins?.....

i think the track count he is referring too is probably on a system built for and tweaked for digital audio.....
 
I recorded at 48k instead of 44k. Would that make that big of a difference.

I have an onboard Promise ATA 100 controller. Would the PCI version be any faster? I wouldn't think so but ya never know.

Would using Win2k make a difference?

I am setting up another system that will have IDE Raid. I am hoping that will put an end to my problems. Does formating your drives with that /:Z extension really make that much difference? I didn't see any big jump in performance when I tried it but the drive was an old 5400 ATA33.
 
I found the Echo Reporter to be a decent (not perfect) assessment. You can get it at www.echoaudio.com.

Are you running any other apps? Any network activity? Any other bottlenecks in your system that you know of? Disk defragged? What size? A few different things can affect performance. Have you serviced packed win2k yet? Some of these answered questions may help.
 
the RAID will make a big different. A good IBM 7200 hard-drive and a RAID controller supposdly rivals even a SCSI drive.:)
 
Kermit,

I am only running Vegas during playback, I don't have a network card installed, No network activity, I defrag frequently, I have tried playing back on a ATA100 Maxtor60gig 5400rpm and an ATA100 IBM 45gig 7200rpm with similar results, I am not using Win2K, I use WinME, I am using a fair amount of plug ins but the performance doesn't seem to improve very much when I turn them off.

I will download Echo Reporter and see what my realtime output is.

I bought a pair of Maxtors and an Adaptec Raid card today but when I got home I found that one of the Maxtor drives was a Seagate. CRAP!! Both drives need to be the same in stripped array. Oh well, I'll try again tomorrow to set up my raid.

KAOS Theory
 
Plugins can cause a problem, turn them ALL off and see what happens. I doubt it, but there might be problems with running the two soundcards at the same time. Updated drivers may help.

Any antivirus software? Office? Any other apps running in the background? Any special "tweaks" you've done to the system?How about the installation of ME? Are any other apps running slow? When did you last format and install everything fresh? What other hardware is installed?

Sounds like you have a bottleneck somewhere, either hardware or software. Tough to diagnose. I would have been annoyed enough to scrap the current setup and rebuild already. You may need to. But before that, update ALL of your drivers and re-install a minimal version of Vegas that will get you buy for now. Take off anything you don't need. Try a minimalist setup as much as possible and add software/hardware as necessary. Hit up windowsupdate.microsoft.com.

Let us/me know what happens. I'm genuinleyinterested. It's my job to troubleshoot this stuff. I'm a little sadistic like that. ;)
 
OK I know I'm repeating myself, but run the HDTach. If you don't have all needed drivers loaded your HDD will not work correctly.

With the drivers not loaded, my transfer rate was 7MB/sec and the CPU load was 97%, couldn't play much tracks.

With the drivers loaded transfer rate was 54MB/sec and the CPU load was 10%, can play back 32 24bit tracks with 11ms latency.

This is a good place to start finding out what's wrong with your system,
Keijo
 
Raid

I was under the impression that RAID meant Redundant Array Independent Disks. I don't think it will make your computer any faster; they are still EIDE hard drives. I could be wrong but I think raid is for multiple drives and mirroring options.

Thanks
Kit
 
Warlock,

I ran HDTach, it say my transfer rate is about 39Meg/s and Cpu usage is 15%. Echo Reporter says I am getting a sustained data rate of about 10Meg/s and should be able to get about 133 tracks of 16bit by 44k. I don't have much problems with 16bit @44k. Its 24bit that is keeping me down. I don't what drivers you are talking about though. My HDs don't need drivers.

Kermit,

I am still working on your suggestions.........

Alchemist,

No difference after turning off read ahead.

Kitwell,

YOu may be right. Today I got my raid working. I have two Maxtor 7200 ATA100 drives and an Adaptec 1200A Raid card running Raid 0(striping) I am seeing no improvement in performance at all. Actually when I run HDTach the red graph is all over the place up and down to extremes. I was under the impression from what I was reading from others that I would get twice the data output by stiping two drives. I will try a Promise card in a day or two. Maybe the Adaptec card just sucks. I called Adaptec tech assist and he says everything is hooked up right and could only suggest trying different pci slots. I saw no difference though. Looks like I am just going to go SCSI.
F*ck this Sh*t
 
Hmmmm now that I have removed that RAID card, the performance my other drives has jumped back up.

My IBM ATA100 45g spits out 39mps with 8.7% cpu usage with an average seek time of 8.6 ms

My Maxtor ATA100 60g spits out 30mps with 6.1% cpu usage with an average seek time of 14.2ms
 
I think ATA100 HDD should have about 100 mps.
My ATA66 has 54 mps with 10% cpu usage.

You need the bus mastering drivers that come with your motherboard, if it's VIA chipset based you need to install VIA 4-in-1 drivers, if it's intel based you need the Intel Ultra ATA100 drivers.

Keijo
 
Maybe driver problems

I simply turned from my Asio-driver to my Multimedia-driver
and it works. The disadvantage is that you have a longer
latency time.
 
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