First Gig with SAC and a Rock Solid System!

[Jesse]

Well, last night was my first gig with SAC and i had the configuration like this:

- 24 Live Channels FOH and Monitor Mixer 1
- 7 instances of Drumagog in Live Mode
- EQ, Gates, Compressors Activated
- Clasik Studio Reverb plugin inserted in Return 1 with Echo/Delay plugin too for voices.
- No Buffers Drops at ASIO 64 Samples with RME HDSP 9652 PCI Card and 3 Behringer ADA8000 Converters

Only 16% of CPU was used. That's impressive :eek: Maybe this is not a big Live Setup but it leaves a lot of headroom for expansion of more tracks in my system, maybe in the future i'll be using SAC/SAWStudio combo too :)

Thanks Bob, this is a great journey! :D


For those who want to build this rock solid system, here are the specs:

PC
- 4U Rack Mount Chassis (http://www.plinkusa.net/web4210.htm)
- Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115036) Wolfdale 3.16 Ghz 6MB L2 Cache
- Kingston Dual Channel Kit 2 GB DDR2 800 Mhz - Model: KVR800D2N6K2/2G (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134635)
- ASUS P5Q (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131295) Motherboard with Intel P45 Chipset
- Transcend 8 GB SATA Solid State Disk (OS Drive) - Model: TS8GSSD25S-S (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208380)
- Transcend 32 GB SATA Solid State Disk (Storage Drive) - Model: TS32GSSD25S-M (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208347)
- MSI Radeon RX1550 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127294) 256 MB PCI-Express Video Card
- CORSAIR 450 Watts Power Supply - Model: CMPSU-450VX (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139003)
- DVD-RW LG GSA-H22N (http://www.lge.com/products/model/detail/gsa-h22n.jhtml) in Black
- Samsung 17" LCD 743NX (http://www.samsung.com/ae/consumer/detail/detail.do?group=computersperipherals&type=monitors&subtype=lcdmonitor&model_cd=LS17MYAKF/XSG)

I have to mention that i made a custom unatended ISO of Win XP SP2 with nLite and now i have only 154 MB on that disk without all the fancy visual stuff, drivers and services that i don't need because this system it's exclusively for SAC.

This Windows it's really really fast, it only takes 49 MB of RAM and with the help of the fastest 8GB Solid State Disk, the windows installer tooks less than ONE Second to format the drive :eek: and the full installation took like 10 minutes, the startup time takes like 15 seconds, i disabled the page file too, with 2 gigs of RAM it is not needed, better performance without it. :)

I made a format of the second 32GB Solid State Disk with Windows Explorer and took like 2 or 3 Seconds to format that drive. :eek:

The diferences between the two drives are the 8GB (SLC) it's faster for writing and the 32GB (MLC) it's slower for Writing but faster for Reading than the 8GB (SLC), i'm going to do a test with Bob's Hard Disk Tester utility and i'll post the results. :)

By the way you must do a BIOS Flash Update to the latest version on the ASUS P5Q, so you can use the Kingston RAM without problems. :)

Jesse

[sebastiandybing]

Thanks for the info...its very interresting with the ssd hd's.
Could you try testing you hd with this utility dskspeed.exe,
http://in.solit.us/archives/show/123364
its a free test program, but its very easy to read and will
also test the random write/read situation.

I would say that a 24 channel show with 6 dromagog sounds
a bit wild:D

Sebastian

[Bob L]

Good going Jesse... :D

Bob L

[DominicPerry]

Thanks for posting such detail and all the links to the components of your system. Very helpful. I think this backs up earlier positive suggestions about the use of E8400/E8500 chips and Asus P35 or P45 MoBos.
Good to see the SSDs worked well - there is one later generation of SSDs now with absolutely absurdly fast performance, but very expensive (Read: up to 155 MB/sec Write: up to 90 MB/sec - (http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/60GB-OCZ-Technology-OCZSSD2-1SLD60G-25-SATA-II-Solid-State-Drive))
Good to know the Transcend stuff works just fine.

And glad the gig went well.

Dominic

[txshonk]

Jesse -

Glad to hear all went well.

And thanks for posting all the info bout your system, especially th nLite reference. I definitely going to have to go check it out and give it a try.

dave

[dip]

i also made a bare bones configuration of sp2 with nlite and many services disabled but i ended up using my old xp sp1/untweaked because is as fast but more important to me :it's the stablest xp version

[Bruce Callaway]

Very interesting Jesse and a great result...

[Jesse]

I forgot to mention that in the ASUS BIOS in the "Storage Configuration" section there's an option "Configure SATA as" by default it's in "IDE", i changed it to "ACHI" to avoid compatibility issues.

In ACHI mode the retail WinXP SP2 installer will NOT detect the SATA Disks, that's why i made a custom WinXP nLite version and i included the ASUS ICH10R AHCI-RAID SATA Driver. :)

[IraSeigel]

Thanks for posting such detail and all the links to the components of your system. Very helpful. I think this backs up earlier positive suggestions about the use of E8400/E8500 chips and Asus P35 or P45 MoBos.
Good to see the SSDs worked well - there is one later generation of SSDs now with absolutely absurdly fast performance, but very expensive (Read: up to 155 MB/sec Write: up to 90 MB/sec - (http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/60GB-OCZ-Technology-OCZSSD2-1SLD60G-25-SATA-II-Solid-State-Drive))
Good to know the Transcend stuff works just fine.

And glad the gig went well.

Dominic

Hi Dominic,
You wrote this back in November. Do you still consider this drive to be very expensive? Has there been anything released since that has caught your attention?

Thanks,
Ira

[DominicPerry]

The price has hardly come down in the UK since November, but the ***163; is very weak against anywhere that actually manufactures things, so it may be a bit cheaper in $ or ***8364;.

OCZ have brought out a newer SSD which is even faster and more expensive - 200MB/s Read and 160MB/s Write speed (http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=948463)-

If I were building a silent machine or one which I wanted to make rugged against shocks, I'd certainly consider one of these options. But the speed isn't really necessary except for video work or super-fast buildmixes - 72 tracks of 24bit (44.1) Mono files is only 10 MB/s (MegaBytes/second). You need a seriously fast machine to take advantage of these high speed disks.

The OCZ disks are actually good value against some of the SuperTalent disks. I don't understand why a 8GB SuperTalent disk is the same price as a 30GB OCZ disk, which has faster read and write times. So if you are thinking of getting one, don't assume all brands are about the same price for the same capacity, unlike 'real' hard disks which are pretty alike. That or I've missed some critical difference, like the number of times you can write to the disk, which is a limiting factor - SSDs die after a fixed number of write operations. Never defragment an SSD, it wears them out and doesn't make them any faster.

Dominic

[Naturally Digital]

SSDs die after a fixed number of write operations. Are you serious? :eek: Wow, I'll have to look into that. What a bummer!

[IraSeigel]

Dominic,
Here is an alternate source and pricing:

http://www.mwave.com/mwave/DeepSearch_v2.asp?scriteria=Hard+Drives+-+SSD+OCZ+ocz&All=y&DID=HD-SSD&PID=HDSSD-OCZ

I think you're right - speed isn't really of the essence, nor probably is capacity. Jesse's example shows that he's using relatively small disks for SAC. The physical stability of the SSD form factor (and its weight) are paramount in a computer for this purpose, agreed?

I would assume that you'd simply take an outboard drive with you to do any major recording?

[DominicPerry]

I can get away with small capacity drives because if I record anything live, I just do a 2-channel recording. And for studio overdubs, I only work on 1,2 maybe three songs of 5 minutes each at a time. Then I back up to an external drive. But I am happy with the idea of a USB attached SSD for recording bigger track counts. Or better still an eSATA SSD. For me, the main reason I looked at the idea of SSD was reducing the noise in the studio - fans and whirring hard disks drive me nuts. And lower power consumption means less heat in a laptop, so the fans come on less.

I guess, if you were recording 48 stereo tracks for an hour, that's about 50GB for 24bit/48KHz, so you'd need at least a 60GB disk, which is pricey. Then again, once you have 48 things making a noise, are you going to hear the hard disk?:) You don't have to worry about SSD performance dropping off as the disk fills up, unlike traditional hard drives (HDD). So you can get as close as you like, as long as you don't fill it up. However, bear in mind that the firmware on some of these drives reserves a portion of the disk to write out bad blocks to, so as the flash memory reaches the end of its life, it preserves your data transparently. Of course, if you don't know that it is doing so, you'll press on regardless until the whole thing craps out. That's why they provide custom software to check the status of the disk. MTBF for the OCZ drives is 1.5 million hours. OCZ also do a 'pro' version which has a shiny metal case and 2 million hours MTBF - probably not worth the premium price. Still can't work out why the SuperTalent disks are so expensive, they have similar MTBFs.

Dominic

[kruntz]

Still can't work out why the SuperTalent disks are so expensive, they have similar MTBFs.
SSD disks are still in their infancy.
Vendors try to get as much as they can from them.
When SSDs will be a commodity, prices will align on capacity and speed...

[Trackzilla]

I also opted for a Flash drive for my OS, space, heat, and read speed being my reasoning. I went with the supertalent 32 GB Multilayer drive 'cuz I found it on special ;) only abt $40 after rebate. I have a 250GB SATA 'conventional' drive for my data, lots of space with a higher write speed than most flash drives seemed best for live multitracking. With virtual memory turned off (4GB of RAM anyway) I figure that keeps my write operations to a dead minimum on the OS drive, which is the primary reason the manufacturers don't really recommend them as preferred for the OS. So far I am not regretting these decisions.

[Jesse]

Dominic,
...
I think you're right - speed isn't really of the essence, nor probably is capacity. Jesse's example shows that he's using relatively small disks for SAC. The physical stability of the SSD form factor (and its weight) are paramount in a computer for this purpose, agreed?



Agreed! :)

I don't want a mechanical hard diks die on me with all the movement i do with the rig, and the heat generation it's a major concern too, i live in the desert so in the summer it's a pain. SSD's solved those two problems for me, i don't need much capacity right now.

For me Transcend have great drives, check the speed test i did here:

http://www.sawstudiouser.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8401

Cheers! :D

Jesse

[IraSeigel]

Here are some additional SSDs that might be worth considering. If anyone has any experience with these, please share.

http://www.mwave.com/mwave/SkuSearch_v2.asp?SCriteria=ba25459

Ira