In my earlier post about extended testing I was just letting it record with all the the channels armed but no real program information happening. I was just recording silent microphones in the studio while I work on another computer. I would "listen" to the playback and could occasionally hear an ambient sound but I wasn't really testing for playback.

Last night I had a band that I work with come in to rehearse for a show and I just let the machine run while they played for the duration of the rehearsal. It ran for a little over 90 minutes without issue. After they were finished when I tried to play it back things were very stuttery. Not exactly dropping out but not right at all. If I shutdown all the plugins I could get it to be more or less okay but moving the mouse around the interface seemed to create this problem too. This is odd because I have been testing previously recorded works that are still in progress and they have not had this problem. The wave files look fine and I can solo them and tell they are recorded okay so the write aspect is fine but the playback is jacked up... I'm a bit stumped. I guess I'll go back and try a standard FW interface in a PCI slot instead of the Apple TB to FW adapter that was working so well. If it's not that, it might be the RAID. Ironic that every attempt to make a better system has nearly or completely failed.

My old computer worked so well. I just wish it had more CPU and I could totally keep working on it. I have a session this weekend that I will likely have to use the old one to complete.



GA-Z77X-UP5 TH mobo | i7 3770k | 16 gigs RAM | Win7/64 | Audio Drive RAID5 2TB via Intel Z77 chipset | Data (picture cache) standard SATA drive | OS drive 256 gig SSD | Apogee AD16x -> Tascam DM3200 -> IF-FWDM-mk2 via Apple FW to Thunderbolt adapter - not ready for primetime yet

I downloaded ATTO benchmarking software and it appears the write speed of my RAID5 is abysmal. I'm looking into solutions including the possibility of RAID10 or buying a RAID controller card or dumping the idea altogether and just going with a single disk. Performance was never a problem in that area before but I thought RAID would provide a measure of security since a failed disk could be recreated.

wmb,i dont know if you put your system specs and soundcard in a post yet,but if you did,most users dont like sifting through posts looking for your set up.
this way we can answer your questions and more than anything...give helpful information.

go to USER CONTROL PANEL(its at the top of the page)
then go to EDIT PROFILE
click on SIGNITURE AND COMMENT

In that box just put your computers specs,your operating system
and your soundcard.

you will be amazed at the ammount of responces you will get and helpful suggestions/people that can relate.

To be honest very rarely do i respond to questions or comments by users who have a blank signiture.

i run the risk of giving misleading information by fact of guessing due to hypothetical estimations.

good luck.

I think the forum is messed up. I added all that information to my signature earlier today and it wouldn't take it. I didn't exceed or even come close to the character limit.

chuckebaby

wmb,i dont know if you put your system specs and soundcard in a post yet,but if you did,most users dont like sifting through posts looking for your set up.
this way we can answer your questions and more than anything...give helpful information.

go to USER CONTROL PANEL(its at the top of the page)
then go to EDIT PROFILE
click on SIGNITURE AND COMMENT

In that box just put your computers specs,your operating system
and your soundcard.

you will be amazed at the ammount of responces you will get and helpful suggestions/people that can relate.

To be honest very rarely do i respond to questions or comments by users who have a blank signiture.

i run the risk of giving misleading information by fact of guessing due to hypothetical estimations.

good luck.

P.S.

This is the text I tried to add...

GA-Z77X-UP5 TH mobo | i7 3770k | 16 gigs RAM | Win7/64 | Audio Drive RAID5 2TB via Intel Z77 chipset | Data (picture cache) standard SATA drive | OS drive 256 gig SSD | Apogee AD16x -> Tascam DM3200 -> IF-FWDM-mk2 via Apple FW to Thunderbolt adapter - not ready for primetime yet.

Testing my sig...

seems to be working now.

So yeah, abysmal raid performance...

Hi wmb,

 What I do, when I am shaking down a system to see if I am confident in its ability, is I casually lay out all the microphones, 16 to 24, and turn on the TV or stereo and then I hit record and let it go for an hour.

 I never actually record for an hour without hitting stop and save... but I like to know I can.

 Having some constant audio source makes it easy to see if you have any big problems.




 Now, here's the important part... I don't listen to the whole hour for drop outs... I actually use Steinberg Wavelab and I scan for errors using the tool built i to that app. That's how I know for sure if it's ok or if a small problem is surfacing.



 Every time I see someone bragging about running 16 channels on a HP DV7 laptop over USB I think to myself... I'll bet that person has never actually checked to see if they are getting dozens of errors.


 I'm not an audio engineer... but I try to act like one, and I think that actually checking for errors with a dedicated error scan tool is a real good way to know if you should assume that your tracks are error free.


 If this is really important to you.... skip all the time it takes to listen for the short errors that are really hard to find by ear when buried in a stack of multi tracks and go straight to the real info with some quick scans.



 all the best,
mike

I though RAID 5 was intended for fault tolerance and not necessarily for high performance. Other RAID levels are used where I/O is the driving factor.

Hi Skook and Mike, 

Just to clear a few things up after a long night. 

Firstly, I don't listen to the entire recordings that I'm testing. When I recorded the rehearsals I just started dropping the cursor randomly and the dropouts were audible. No further analysis necessary. I do use wavelab for that function frequently when I'm checking final mixes or if I hear something odd in a mix when I take out of the studio. 

RAID5 in my setup may be suffering some configuration issues. Presently all the drives are on the same controller but two of them are on SATA III ports. I misread or thought I read something about this being okay. When I get to the studio later I'm going to move the RAID5 onto the SATA II ports and see if that improves things before I confront getting rid of it completely. I knew that RAID5 was not the highest performer but I didn't expect lower write performance than a single drive. Also, I didn't know that RAID5 actually requires some parity calculations to be performed by the CPU. Of all the on board raid solutions it has the highest probability of being a lower performer compared to on board implementations of RAID0 or RAID1. Furthermore I never expected really high performance raid in terms of massive

 transfer rates but I also didn't expect lower performance than a single drive. As you can see from the graphic above the write speeds are terrible. Some online searches also targeted the Intel Z77 chipset as having abysmal RAID5 performance. I found this out the hard way. I wanted a RAID5 setup for the affordable security. It can fix itself while offering some RAID0 benefits. At this point I can add a 4th HDD and try RAID10 and move my data drive to the Marvel controller or abandoned the on board RAID solutions and get a dedicated card for a few hundred dollars. I don't need server level performance of hundreds of MB/S transfers and I thought the on board solution might get me a little performance boost while adding the security of self repair. It's looking like I will continue nightly backups to a USB drive during sessions. Those have never really made me feel all that secure because I've had three external backup drive failures to zero audio drive failures. I'm getting close to dropping the raid concept entirely. 

Cheers