I seem to remember when anything above 53k; was some no man's land called upper memory; and took some doing to get at, or was that just a bad dream? I know my little 7 pound Tosheba t-1000, only came with Dos version 1.1 burned ontoa chip, and something like 53 k ram. I loved it, instant booting, no whirring hard drive, no heat from it, and 1 battery charge lasted weeks.
I piggy backed the DoubleTalk onto it with velcro.I missed some features from dos 5, so I stripped dos 5 to the bare bones and put it, plus Vocaleyes, plus Letter perfect, Plus the Workd Perfect spell checker and dictionary, onto a 720k floppy, I think their size was, with oodles of room left to save a novel, and happily typed away on it. You could not out type the computer, no matter how fast you went, plus dos and Vocaleyes always performed flawlessly.
The Tosheba's clock speed was something like 3.6 mhz.The only time you noticed slowing was when doing a spell check with that huge Letter Perfect dictionary. Doesn't that sound like our great grandfathers longing for the relaxing pace of pokeing along country roads in their horse and buggy?
On 11/19/2011 8:19 AM, Chris Belle wrote:
Not a hoax, but appropriate for a certain task. Caching data for certain operations, even is slower, can help, remember, these drives read pretty fast, even the cheap ones. But not appropriate for daw operations. Also, some technologies are touted for the money making aspect of it, you know like the virus companies making viruses, and then making the cure? Ready boost has it's uses, remember expanded memory back in the dos days where you had slow access to memory above 1 meg through a page of the upper memory area which was used to move data in and out of an area where dos couldn't normally get at? Well ready boost even through slow usb can have data ready, say for spread sheets, and other open apps, you know how sighted people like to have 20 windows open at once, but when you need low latency fast operation like with a daw, and remember, on daw machines, they don't even recommend raid systems, because of the latency introduced by the cuing in windows, you want direct access to ram, the kernal, etc and not some second level thing. Best as I can explain it, not junk but not for what you want to do with it. But sometimes, trying things out no matter what is how we learn best. Maybe it'd help with some of your business apps. Let me put things in perspective too. One track of 44.1 audio stereo one minute of it recorded takes up 10 megs. That's not so much. A camera can handle a standard video stream especially in compressed format, and avi isn't so bad either, I forget the data rate on it, but it's when your asking for lots of multiples of that, like on a 20 track 24/96 24 bit 20 data streams of that at once, and maybe going both ways, say like from my 16 track board, and then also asking fast memory to go from samples you want to play instantly, see the difference? YOu want everything residing in fast ram, or at the very least, on a fast hard-drive which can feed and receive data quickly through a fast controler, like your sata connection. So when you can afford it, give your old metal friend more actual ram, if it's worth it to you if you want to somewhat better daw performance, run that utility you think is a virus I sent you which all the daw vendors use and check your dpc latency and see what's holding up the show, in the pdf that came with that util if you'll to read it, it explains dpc latency and exactly what that is, windows is not a real time operating system and things in the kernal have to wait in line to be processed, and that's why a misbehaving video driver or other thing can cause crackling and such because the cpu is waiting for that driver to finish and in the mean time your apps for the daw are saying, where's my data. So tuning a system at low level for the merrygo-round to go faster is the whole deal. Good luck with it all. At 06:35 AM 11/19/2011, you wrote:Okay, I'm not gonna say more about expecting miracles from thumb drives. They are limited to what they are, puny slow. I'm still looking to learn if there's a neglected possibility of smaller flash drives than the typical S S D's out there, but even the prices on fast SD cards for cameras aren't so cheap yet. Some video cams do record in compressed formats, some good ones don't. These Olympus ones my wife favors record non compressed in both video and audio, so don't have long recording times. Being regular still cameras with a video feature, they have way better glass lenses,not plastic, and way better lux sensitivity, and there's a huge difference in their built in mike and 16 bit 44k audio. In an ordinary room in the house, with no special lighting, I can if nobody's around who can see; point it at something that might need recording, like for legal proof, and it gets a good picture,.and nice sound. I think the flash cards for cameras are getting some of the superior cell technology that goes into SSD's, only they come in 32 gig sizes, for maybe $50; instead of 240 gigs for $500, and there could be a scheme to get one of them to extend ram. Why would MS offer ReadyBoost if it was a hoax? . Wow, it's cold here this morning. you're lucky to be snug in that super insulated studio of yours. Indigo L they're 011 2:43 PM, Chris Belle wrote:It's jumped up another notch sata 3 is here at 6 gigs. Been working my butt off today on this really great gospel song, country gospel, putting dobro licks and acoustic guitar, wish I layed dobro, but had to settle for loops for now. but I can sure put mandolin, and even our old tools are great, the old edirol super quartet has this nice tight brush kit whish is almos the same as the one 10 years later on my fantom, these guys just recycle the same samples over and over again don't ya know 'grin'? the wavs mercury bundle is great with some really sweet guitar presets. I ordered another blue encore 100, that is by far the sweeetest dynamic microphone I've ever used, even like it better than my sm7b for vocal recording, I mean singing vocals. Nathan's song writing is very strong, and man, is this going to be a nice album. I do ok, but I wish we had a bigger budget to get some of those hot nashville pickers on here. But this song is a 3/4 6/8 time song, and nathan is definitely old school but he's got quite a following around here, when i went visiting totheir sister church everyone came up to us and said how much they liked the tracks we'd made for him, and we got nibbles for more work. See, everybody likes to sing and dance, and half the preachers in the world are worship leaders too, so when you get to work on music with possitive uplifting lyrics instead of all the negative crap on the radio, well, it just makes you feel good. I like, and I have dabbled in all kinds of music, but my hearts in roots music, and I think I'm falling back in love with my country roots, all that lovely intimate stuff that came out of nashville in the 70s before it got so commercial. Well, it's always been commercial, but you know, the whole mtv cmtv thing. I've been reading a book about Glenn Cambell, and all the stuff he went through before he came to christ. Boy that old boy covered a lot of ground before he assumed room temprature 'grin'. anyway, a lot of these cameras record in compressed formats. There is fast flash media out there, but it'll cost you plenty, and won't work as well as a ram upgrade, or better yet, faster computer. Save that one for the light stuff, and go torture your new machine. You can't make a honda pull a tractor trailer 'grin'. But it's your money, try some stuff you read about, see if it work mad scientist 'grin'. At 09:05 AM 11/18/2011, you wrote:Okay, apparently the actual transfer speed of thumb drives is limited to about 25 meg/sec, even though I haven't achieved even that pitiful rate. Aside from USB format, there are other kinds of flash cards for cameras that can't be creeping along at that snail's pace, since you can plug one of the fast cards into a video camera and record video directly onto the card, and I think video must be requiring way more megs per second than music. Even the ancient Olympus camera my wife gave me for emergency video use both records video, plus wav audio at 16 bits, 44.1 k. There are PCI cards for flash media that plug into a SATA header on the motherboard. Don't SATA headers transfer data at up to 3 gigs per second, so the flash card is gonna be able to goas fast as it's able; without being limited by the controller, I would think..? On 11/18/2011 5:53 AM, Chris Belle wrote:Yup , and ntfs isn't really any faster, heads up, most of the portable recorders and dedicated devices use fat or fat32, ntfs has indexing and such so finding the files will be faster, and you can control cluster size and such, but nothing you can do about physical speed of your media. That's fixed. the main thing ntfs is supposed to have is that it's a journaling file system which means theoretically, read and write operations get done before any changes get made which means you aren't supposed to be able to corrupt files by leaving them in an in between stte. But don't believe for a minute ntfs file systems can't get messed up. I don't like write caching of anykind because it just is a big fake like Tom says, and can leave you thinking your stuff's been written when in fact, it hasn't. At 01:16 AM 11/18/2011, you wrote:If I'm not mistaken setting the drive to best performance just turns on write caching. I believe this was on by default in XP and then the default was changed to off in Vista or Win 7 due to folks losing data by just yanking the stick out when the illusion of the process being complete was so proudly announced by the Windows deception manager. Although with that jab having been tossed, I must give Microsoft credit for realizing they'd never get folks to do something as complicated as a couple clicks when it comes to ejecting a removable drive. As far as the new system being faster? Well, spec's are nothing more than theoretical optimal performance ratings. The bottom line on performance boils down to the weakest link in the system. It's why price has for the most part been directly correlated with performance on systems of the same spec's. I remember years ago when I used to be an avid reader of computer magazine. Every year they would compare the new systems performance head to head. And it was amazing how two computers with the same exact spec's could produce startlingly different results on benchmark testing systems. I think it's why IBM sold off their PC business. At least back then the IBM systems would always be almost twice as fast as the closest contender with the same spec's. But no one was willing to pay for performance. And IBM wasn't willing to build systems with misleading spec's. Tom On 11/17/2011 10:01 PM, Indigo wrote:Here's an interesting little experiment, could be free if you have a spare thumb drive, shouldn't hurt it anyway, always reversable: Go to my computer, right click on your flash drive, press properties, hardware.. Select your flash drive from the list Hit Properties Click the policies tab Press optimize for performance Hit O.k. Format your drive to NTFS. (FAT and FAT32 are both very slow. Before unplugging it, its recommended that you hit Eject in my computer; however I have not lost data from it by not doing so. You will now have an insanely fast flash drive. unquote. I'm going to try this one. Also I'm going to the USB ports on the newer computer, to try to understand why I get way faster USB transfer speeds than on this machine, when both have USB version 2 ports. Do all USB ports have write cache enabled? That is said to speed up sata hard drives, but can result in total data loss if there's any loss of power while writing, but I'm not sure if write cache enabled can be applied to USB flash drives, or maybe it already is applied.. On 11/17/2011 8:56 PM, Chris Belle wrote:You've got to think of the whole chain, and unless you reall spend lots of money, most flash memory is made from mlc instead of slc. Single layer cells use more cells and don't try to stack multiple writes to fewer cells as mlc does, so that's why they write so slow and read somewhat faster. But no matter what you do, the usb bus gets lower priority than your ram does, and it might be ok for caching, but will never be as good as real ram. so what you'd spend on a top flight flash drive or slc to use as ready boost, you could afford more ram, but 2 gigs is pretty buff for xp, and it's probably not worth it. It'll be like increasing your paging file size or virtual memory but since it's on faster flash memory, it might be a bit faster, but nothing that great. But it's your money, go ahead and experiment and see. At 06:13 PM 11/17/2011, you wrote:When I read the specs for USB 2, it supports transfers up to 400 megs per second, if I read correctly, and yet the transfer rates to and from the thumb drives around here are pitiful. The thumb drives I have are by Hitachi, a good maker, I guess, so should do okay, and yet I get only about 11 to 15 megs second on my new computer, which has USB 2 ports, not USB 3, and only 2 or 3 megs second on this other Windows 7 64 bit computer, also with USB 2 ports. I can't comprehend why there is so much difference in reading and writing to the same USB drives on the two computers. I read an article saying you can soup up any thumb drive by reforematting it to NTFS instead of FAT32, plus right clicking on the drive and selecting Optimize For Best Performance. Even so, I read posts in that forum claiming only 30 or 50 megs second at best. Some posts said it makes no difference, 30 or 50 megs second is a false report, caused by reformatting to NTFS, that transfer to and from the drive actually continues after the final report is displayed, and you'll lose your data if you quit too soon. Some forum posts said NTFS is no faster, even slower than FAT 32. Okay, maybe that trick works and maybe not, but where can I buy a very fast thumb drive, as fast as the medium will go, and what do I look for in designation, flash medium class, whatever? It doesn't need to be a huge drive, no larger than 4 gigs or so, and I'm definitely not looking for a SSD drive, just a thumb drive. I read about SD flash drives, for video cameras and such, that are fast enough to record video live at high frame rates. That's the speed I want in a USB thumb drive. Any ideas, anyone? Thanks for any tips, Indigo LFor all your audio production needs and technology training, visit us at www.affordablestudioservices.com or contact Chris Belle cb1963@xxxxxxxxxxxxx or Stephie Belle stephieb1961@xxxxxxxxxxxxx for customized web designFor all your audio production needs and technology training, visit us at www.affordablestudioservices.com or contact Chris Belle cb1963@xxxxxxxxxxxxx or Stephie Belle stephieb1961@xxxxxxxxxxxxx for customized web designFor all your audio production needs and technology training, visit us at www.affordablestudioservices.com or contact Chris Belle cb1963@xxxxxxxxxxxxx or Stephie Belle stephieb1961@xxxxxxxxxxxxx for customized web designFor all your audio production needs and technology training, visit us at www.affordablestudioservices.com or contact Chris Belle cb1963@xxxxxxxxxxxxx or Stephie Belle stephieb1961@xxxxxxxxxxxxx for customized web design
