I am using Ubuntu 12.04 on a SSD. As I understand it, I want to write to the SSD as little as possible. I moved all my temp folders to RAM with fstab so the audacity Temporary files directory should be writing to the RAM. Is 16g of RAM enough space for recording vinyl? Should I move that to the HDD with user data?
Can I get the .audacity-data to go to the HDD and not in my home directory?
Any other audacity tweeks to save the life of my SSD?
Did you get a really cheap or early one? I run an SSD in my MacBook Pro and as I recall, it has generously more than the life expectancy of spinning rust – particularly in a portable machine. Unless you got an early one, the Mean Time Between Failure is up into some pretty serious numbers.
Yes, there are things you can do that are silly, like optimizing or defragging. Complete waste of time. You can turn off “Auto Spin Down,” too. It could be said that if you’re going to capture or play anything in real time, the SSD is totally the place to do it. They have no mechanical delays or other platter management to get in the way of the show.
There is another MacBook up on 6West and I’m shocked how much slower and sloppier his Hard Drive machine is compared to mine. This one is hands down the one to pick for audio or video production.
You can get into trouble by forcing Audacity to use Memory for production. Audio (and video) gets large in a hurry and unless you’re planning to edit a thirty second television commercial, it’s really easy to run out of room.
Koz
The Audacity temp folder is set in Preferences: http://manual.audacityteam.org/manual/help/manual/man/directories_preferences.html
This folder is used until the project is saved. When the project has been saved, the project “_data” folder is used for temporary files.
You will also notice that there is an option to use RAM as an audio cache. This is not generally recommended for modern machines and there is some question about whether or not this feature works correctly (it doesn’t work at all on my Debian machine, and so far we’ve been unable to work out why it isn’t working).
The .audacity-data folder does not normally get written to very much. There is a tiny bit of data that gets written to ~/.audacity-data/audacity.cfg each time that you shut down Audacity, but it’s hardly worth bothering about. The auto-save file is written regularly to ~/.audacity-data/AutoSave/ but it is typically only a few kB - not exactly a lot of data.
Is the SSD the only drive in the system?
It’s a bit of a paradox that everyone wants SSDs because they read/write so fast, but then don’t want to use them for read/write activity.
It’s a bit of a paradox that everyone wants SSDs because they read/write so fast, but then don’t want to use them for read/write activity.
We use a solid block of SSDs to play movies to clients in real time. The movie theaters use compressed video and shortcuts and, of course, you do at home, too, but we can’t do that with a client. Four SSDs high and four wide. I don’t know which array, but it will play uncompressed wide-screen movie files in real time for several hours. Each array is 6TB. It looks like an animated Christmas tree when it’s working. We’re not bashful about using them.
We’ve lost one or two drives, but the failure rate is much lower than if we tried to do it with spinning rust. We keep track of the warrantees. We weren’t sure how it was going to work out, either.
Koz
Actually I have 2 SSD’s (Windows & Ubuntu) and one 1.5T HDD (user libraries). The Ubuntu is a 30G Kingston and I paid under $100. Even if it only lasts a year it is worth it for the speed gain! I thought if there was an easy way to move those constantly used directories to the HDD then it might help the life of the SSD.
Where Audacity produces a lot of temporary data is with the audio data files (thousands of little .au files). These can easily be moved to any drive that is available by setting the Audacity temp folder in preferences and choosing where to save projects while you are working on them, however, it is in the read/write of those data files where a fast drive can most benefit the performance. Having said that, a 72000 rmp hard drive should be able to handle over 50 simultaneous stereo tracks provided that the rest of the system is running well.
Thanks for the responses. I moved what I could off the ssd and I have accepted that some programs will have to write to it. If the program is as useful as audacity I am not going to worry about the ssd.