To record 16-24 tracks AT ONCE at 96Khz on Nuendo...

[Saudade]

What is a recommended config for a AMD 64 DAW?

I know I have to set up a RAID "0" with at least two SATA NCQ drives.

What kind of processor speed and RAM capacity etc do I have to get to ensure the system does that WITHOUT BREAKING A SWEAT. Any MB recommendations?
Its not exactly like I got no budget constraints so refrain from suggesting opterons or whatever 4 CPU server type systems (with 16 GB RAM).

What is the cheapest I can go?

Would be nice to hear from folks who actually have done that/or regularly does that on their Nuendo, especially in live situations where one take is all you got


Oh, and are there any buffer settings within Nuendo 2 or 3 that can further stabilise the performance?

[BrianT]

Dual Opterons with a pair of fast SATA drives with 16MB buffers will do more than what you want, and without really breaking a sweat. In my experience, once you go to RAID, the 10K Raptors perform no better than the best of the 7,200 RPM drives, as long as you have 16MB buffers.

But if you want to get a bit more intense, dual dualcore Opterons with 4 or 5 drives in RAID 5 on a 64 bit 3rd party RAID controller is the high end solution. I run several of those systems, recording mission critical live program. That setup benchmarks at about 225MB/sec, about 20x what you need to do 24 tracks at 96K.

Typically, it's about 100 tracks at 48K/24 bits for about 1.5 hours using 2 RME MADI cards, live. We do it 3 times a week, every week. The only time we've had a failure in the last year is when one engineer allowed his rig to fill up the hard drives....even on a 1.2TB array that can happen if you let it. Other than that, we're 100% solid. I can play back all 100 tracks at the full 4x shuttle speed on Nuendo.

BTW, my burn in for these rigs is recording 200 tracks at 48/24 for 4 hours. They can do that reliably, assuming the drives are not too fragmented. I once dropped 150 tracks in record on empty drives in the evening and went home for the night. The machine recorded for about 11.5 hours then dropped out of record with a "Disk too full" message, while retaining the 11.5 hour recording.

With the right machine properly built, this stuff can be as solid as tape ever was. The trick is the proper system being built by somebody who knows what they're doing.

[jcschild]

HI,

a single Sata drive will do up to 35-40 tracks 96k.
no need for Brians Killer rig setup!

plus with Nuendo you can split tracks. EG tracks 1-30 to drive E 30-60 to drive F
raid is not needed.

Scott
ADK

Hey Brian,

wasnt that dave heibergers system your taking about? arm tracks and left for the night.... the same place where the garbage truck took out his cables.

[BrianT]

Originally Posted by jcschild

Hey Brian,

wasnt that dave heibergers system your taking about? arm tracks and left for the night.... the same place where the garbage truck took out his cables.

No, I don't think Dave's rig would do that. Not enough HD space at that track count.

Scott, my point is....overkill is a good thing when you never, ever want to have a problem. I think you agree when you think about it. I know you have rigs out doing live. For instance, I would not expect a single drive to remain bulletproof for recording longform concert type live sessions, day in and day out, over a long period of time. All it takes is that one drive having a momentary brain fart and you're done, having missed "X" amount of time in the middle of the event.

Plus, there's no data backup redundancy. If it's really mission critical, I thnk you have to have more than one drive, and you have to have some HD failure tolerance. These things do break now and then.

And my experience has been that dual (or more) CPUs are far more reliable than singles. I know you agree with that one. So I say at least a dual Opteron, with at least 3 drives in a RAID 5, or 4 drives in RAID 10. At least.

The other argument in favor of an over-the-top drive setup, especially for live, is that HDs derate their performance pretty substantially as they fill up. As low as 60% the performance when they're 3/4 full as compared to empty, just due to the physics of the platters. Add in some fragmentation, and all the sudden you have 1/2 or less the performance that you think you do based on running your benchmarks on fresh drives. More drives mean that you're working closer to 100% of your best case HD performance, all else being equal. It's not just reliability either. It's also instant locates/playbacks while working.

Personally, I would never record mission critical audio to a single drive. Sooner or later, that's going to bite you. Search Gearslutz for the word "failure" and read a few horror stories.

[BrianT]

Originally Posted by Saudade

I know I have to set up a RAID "0" with at least two SATA NCQ drives.

Snip

What is the cheapest I can go?

Snip

especially in live situations where one take is all you got

Raid "0" puts 2 or more drives in a stripe for performance. Better performance, but twice the failure risk of even a single drive. If either drive fails, you're dead for all data on the array. Add one more drive and go to RAID 5, and you can tolerate one drive failing completely.

The cheapest you can go based on "one take is all you got"? Or just the cheapest you can go. Those are different answers.

You're talking about a few hundred dollars difference in how high end you do this, up to maybe $1000, tops. How important is the "one take is all you got" part to you? HDs are $100-150 a pop (cheap insurance) and there is a reason why the Opteron mobos cost more. They are workstation/server class machines, designed to handle more bandwidth without choking.

Fact is, there have been far more audio issues with the current crop of AMD X2 based motherboards than there have with the current crop of Opteron motherboards.

[Saudade]

Thanks for the input!

Yeah I was thinking more along the lines of X2 rather than opterons. I would say "the one take is all I got " mantra is not immediately impt, but the setup I am talking about will be primarily recording bands in a commercial "lo-mid" end studio (live takes, minimal overdubs) and the owner want the same setup to be deployable "live" at small gigs. It will probably be based around a Midas Venice 160 or 240 console so we are already "toast" in terms of our limited budget. 96khz is also not an immediate need but is a definite step in the near future. So we want something that has a bit of headroom left to accomodate a 24 track 96k scenario.

Won't an X2 do???? (pls tell me yessss....)

Oh I was thinking of a MB with built in RAID controllers, so the Raid 5 may not be available.....or are there any X2 MBs with Raid 5 controllers built in?

[Saudade]

Hey Scott,

Quoting from your site:

"We have found 1 AMD PCIe motherboard that works with everything (UADs and Poco) and any interface.
we still see a performance penalty at very low buffers (acceptable) where the FX 60 performs on par with the X2 4400 on older Nforce 3 boards."

May I ask which board is that?

[manning1]

saudade....
just my 2 cents...
and i hope i make some sense.
heres some points.
no flames please.
the other day i was on a regular amd single processor and she did 40 tracks plus over 20 plug ins. but this was at regular 16 bit 44.1.
if your willing to bend a bit on the 96khz need. i think it will save you.
i like to look at the big picture in all of this viz a viz a consumer buying your record.
and my position is 24 bit 44.1 is fine. with a caveat.
use very good ada convertors.( i cant afford them...lol)
ive heard some excellent songs/tracks done with 24/44.1.
once again its in the hands of the engineer many times.
people have posted on here i think it was about mwagener doing hit songs useing regular 16 bit. and many folks used 16 bit adats in the past.
so thats good enough for me. but i'm sure others will disagree.

on motherboards. really you have to take it upon yourself to test on various platforms.
and this is what i do. heres why .
motherboards can change. whats hot one minute might not be down the road
in a little while. it purely reflects the rapid constant change in the computer industry.
also sometimes, and ive seen this on more than a few occasions....
a motherboard that works for one person might not necessarily work for another.
motherboards CAN go through various revisions.
the only solution is to take your sound device/sound card/whatever and your software and project examples and run tests.
the reason i say this is we all work differently.
as to whether a dual amd 64 will make you happy. load one up with a project and see. several amd dealers have let me run tests. just find one that will let you do this. at amd.com itself are a list of amd approved vendors for motherboards
which you can use as a guide for your own testing.
in summary you cant beat real life testing with YOUR projects. peace.
ps...if you DO test on an amd dual core 64.
i would suggest you load it up with memory.
and try fast 16 mb cache hard drives to test.

[Blenn]

I honestly think you should avoid raid. It's just not needed. I use a raptor and can fairly easily do 50-60 tracks at 24bit 96khz on my Nuendo rig, which is dual opteron 270.

Raid is just not needed unless it's 60 tracks of audio at 24/96 mixed with video and even then I suspect you may get away with a single Raptor.

Save yourself the stress and heartache and stick to a single raptor.

Just my opinion.


Paul

[zemlin]

FWIW ...
My first DAW was a PIII 750 - I don't remember what class of IDE drives I was running in it - I'm thinking they were ATA66. No RAID, nothing fancy.

I could record 24 tracks at 44.1 KHz no problem on that machine.

Recording is not the hard part as far as computer hardware is concerned - it's mixing. Lot of disk space and a clean OS setup should be all you need.

How reliably you can record seems to be more of a software issue than a system issue. The most reliable tracker I've found is Vegas.

[Saudade]

More good points!

Manning1, its precisely because I don't have pristine A/D converters that I need as much help I could get in terms of quality. We're probably using something like 2 units of the Presonus firewire stuff or the Yamaha i88X to keep costs down.

I was skeptical about 96khz until recently. I am using a 1999 Korean made soundcard and I can hear a REAL difference recording at 44.1 and 96. The 96 high end detail is so natural and 44 sounds really "choked" in comparison. Not only that, 96khz added a whole "roundness" to the sound. I used the Voxengo R8brain Pro to convert the recorded 96 file to 44.1 and there is still a black and white difference between that and an original 44.1 file. And I was just playing dirt guitar! And when all tracks are done in 96 I dare say the compounded sonic improvement is easily 15-20%.

That is a lot of help to people like me who will never be Wagener.

So if imagine 6 years of converter technology down the road, I figured I could get some serious mileage by recording at 96 even with mid-cost converters. Until we have $ to upgrade to Lynx aurora (which we have to purchase the AES 16 as well to use it with the DAW) or the AD16+DA16 (!!!!).

Getting back to the subject, my current AMD64 3000 (single core) is really a let down since its suffering from the well documented PCI-E bandwidth issue due to my early generation Asus mb..........

But I am glad to hear I may need far less complicated setups than I imagine to do 24 tracks of 96khz.

[BrianT]

Originally Posted by Blenn

Save yourself the stress and heartache and stick to a single raptor.

Just my opinion.


Paul

I'm really not trying to be argumentative here, just state another view.

But your statement about "Save yourself the stress and heartache" is exactly what I mean. Search the archives for people who had their project on a single drive that went belly up. Just go to most any DAW forum and type "Help!" or "Desperate" in the search engine, and the most likely topic is HD failure.

So the way I see it, you have the predictable, proactive version of "stress" by setting up some data redundancy in the beginning, or you have the unpredicatable stress of, sooner or later, an HD going south on you. And it always seems to happen, at least in the posts you read "at the worst possible time, right before I was going to back everything up", doesn't it?

An extra HD for $125 and 5 minutes to set up Mirroring on your mobo is too much hassle to bulletproof your work? Really?

[jcschild]

Originally Posted by Saudade

Hey Scott,

Quoting from your site:

"We have found 1 AMD PCIe motherboard that works with everything (UADs and Poco) and any interface.
we still see a performance penalty at very low buffers (acceptable) where the FX 60 performs on par with the X2 4400 on older Nforce 3 boards."

May I ask which board is that?

sorry to be a butthead but NO.

we spent god aweful amounts of money and employee time to finally find one.
so for now i am keeping it close to my chest.

dont want the competition Stealing our R&D or DYIs using our site for a shopping list.

sorry

Scott
ADK

[Blenn]

Originally Posted by BrianT

I'm really not trying to be argumentative here, just state another view.

But your statement about "Save yourself the stress and heartache" is exactly what I mean. Search the archives for people who had their project on a single drive that went belly up. Just go to most any DAW forum and type "Help!" or "Desperate" in the search engine, and the most likely topic is HD failure.

So the way I see it, you have the predictable, proactive version of "stress" by setting up some data redundancy in the beginning, or you have the unpredicatable stress of, sooner or later, an HD going south on you. And it always seems to happen, at least in the posts you read "at the worst possible time, right before I was going to back everything up", doesn't it?

An extra HD for $125 and 5 minutes to set up Mirroring on your mobo is too much hassle to bulletproof your work? Really?

Brian - you're talking about a mirroring raid system. Yes this does do automatic backups. No arguments there but the type of raid system, I THINK the original poster was referring to, uses two hard drives to enhance it's performance over a single drive. These are more prone to failure than a single drive. Hence my save yourself comment.

That's what I was referring to. And by the way I stand by my other comment that a single Raptor would more than do what he requires. It is always prudent to backup your work as well.

Paul

[jcschild]

Originally Posted by BrianT

No, I don't think Dave's rig would do that. Not enough HD space at that track count.

Scott, my point is....overkill is a good thing when you never, ever want to have a problem. I think you agree when you think about it. I know you have rigs out doing live. For instance, I would not expect a single drive to remain bulletproof for recording longform concert type live sessions, day in and day out, over a long period of time. All it takes is that one drive having a momentary brain fart and you're done, having missed "X" amount of time in the middle of the event.

Plus, there's no data backup redundancy. If it's really mission critical, I thnk you have to have more than one drive, and you have to have some HD failure tolerance. These things do break now and then.

And my experience has been that dual (or more) CPUs are far more reliable than singles. I know you agree with that one. So I say at least a dual Opteron, with at least 3 drives in a RAID 5, or 4 drives in RAID 10. At least.

The other argument in favor of an over-the-top drive setup, especially for live, is that HDs derate their performance pretty substantially as they fill up. As low as 60% the performance when they're 3/4 full as compared to empty, just due to the physics of the platters. Add in some fragmentation, and all the sudden you have 1/2 or less the performance that you think you do based on running your benchmarks on fresh drives. More drives mean that you're working closer to 100% of your best case HD performance, all else being equal. It's not just reliability either. It's also instant locates/playbacks while working.

Personally, I would never record mission critical audio to a single drive. Sooner or later, that's going to bite you. Search Gearslutz for the word "failure" and read a few horror stories.

Hey Brian,

LOL YOU of all people should know what i ship for "Live" rigs.. you have 6 of them!

and yes i agree 100% with you.
while what you recommend is not "Needed" it is by far "prudent".

the poor guy stated "dont recommend opterons" with a sted budget.

personally i perfer the way we set up U2.
Dual redundant systems. but neither is using Raid. they split tracks. and they split them directly to the removable bays. remove drives, insert new ones next show please!

now for the majority who cant do redundate systems, yes raid 5 makes sense.

heck raid 0+1 makes sense also.

however you do remeber what happened to Chuck Ainlay?!

Raid array took a hike all data gone and the clients in 5 places accross the country.
and no back up...
thank God we were able to rebuild the MBRs on the raid and recover his data.

so even raid can fail. we have talked about this a 1/2 doz times.
speaking of which your about due for a phone call. havent given you a hard time in months.

FYI Kelly kept going on about his visit to you guys last week.
very impressed.

Scott
ADK

[Saudade]

Originally Posted by jcschild

sorry to be a butthead but NO.

we spent god aweful amounts of money and employee time to finally find one.
so for now i am keeping it close to my chest.

dont want the competition Stealing our R&D or DYIs using our site for a shopping list.

sorry

Scott
ADK