Hi, I made a few tests with hdtest.c in order to evaulate the performance of a server of a friend of mine , Udo Jocher ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). The box is a dual PIII 450 with 512MB RAM and a software RAID5 array consisting of 5 9GB Quantum Atlas IV9 SCA UW2 SCSI disks. I tried hdtest and increased the number of files to 100. I get about 26MB/sec sustained during the single threaded test. Now with a 48Khz @ 32bit track having a datarate of about 200KB/sec, that means more than 100 tracks simultaneously. I have yet to deterimine how much buffersize you would need in order to overcome to filesystem latencies, but it would be definitively possible to get 100 tracks sustained. (when I get some time I will port hdrbench to audio-less architectures, with an output module which doesn't output audio but simulates the datarate by throttling down the speed to 180-200KB/sec) Plus consider the fact that you are running on a RAID5 array, that means 100% data saefty even if a disk breaks (although the disk performance might suffer a bitdue when running in degraded mode). (the cost of the box is about $7-8k, I believe. Notice that the disk performance is about 60% better than on the SGI O2k which costed 10-20 times more :-) ) add a couple of Hammerfalls and you get the DAW of your dreams. (And if it's not enough for you we can always cluster :-) ) I can only say kudos to the linux-raid folks ! Benno.
