July 2005 Archives

Performed some OS updates and added several new cuts by several artists. I am continuing to put forth the beats as I update and upgrade the technical portion in the background.

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The hardware portion of my upgrade is complete. The drives come up in the bios running as ultra 160. The system is noticeably faster. The previous drives while 10k drives were running as 40mbps SCSI speeds still with parallel performance and error correction of SCSI drives better than IDE but now the system is screaming performing at the true capabilities of the drives!!

Oh yes hard drive performance and speed is very important along with the CPU speed and RAM speed and size. All of those things contribute to the system performance.

As users this will be more evident as I manipulate the songs on the hard drive, this way there will be less skips and buffering when I am setting up songs live and moving around the order. Actually it was pretty good before but now it’s even better!!

I have noticed improved boot speed, application execution speed etc...

Next step some software and web site appearance changes.

Replaced the boot drive and the primary drive where I keep the music files on my primary music server system. I am now up and running on my backup music server that’s a bit slower with fewer resources.

I am as always running SCSI but now that all drives on the primary music server come in at 10k LVD SCSI my drive speeds are appropriately ultra 160.

I also made sure that my SCA connectors are properly rated for the ultra 160 speeds.

You can sometimes get a non-rated ultra 160 or 320 SCA adapters to work but you will not approach the top SCSI speeds of your SCSI adapter.

I also have placed another sound card in the music server to play better with Winamp and shout cast servers and still keep my playback capabilities.

Reloading the OS and applications so hopefully before we hit the weekend everything will be purring with the new hardware and reloaded OS and applications. This should be a superbly tuned system!

I have so much else to do for projects that are more critical and not computer related I'm not sure when I will get the Winamp & Shoutcast portion done. I at least wanted to have the hardware ready for full experimentation when I had a free moment

I have my script for the play list worked out I just have to figure out how and where to display it on the website.

For now I'm running off of my backup music server that was playing Christmas tunes during the holidays. Not nearly as robust as my Xeon 2.4 server class system so I will not be moving songs around adjusting the play list too much while I am on the backup music server. With the size of the play list the backup system doesn't have enough memory or CPU resources to handle constant manipulation of the play list.

I will be back up in the normal format soon and then will start working with my backup Web & music server to test out new software, approaches and appearances for the site!

Stick around more to come!!