Your problem is very likely not hardware related.
The problem lies in the kernel which,while the disk is under stress, does not
run your sound-app for a time which is bigger than your audio buffer,
and therefore the sound skips.
(There is a little possibilty that the problems are hardware related but
this happens only with broken hardware which monopolizes the
bus for too long time , like some old matrox GFX cards, or some old
IDE controllers, but PII class machines should be safe in this respect)
Ingo Molnar found the weak spots in the kernel , and with his patches, he
demonstrated that Linux is able to provide very low scheduling latencies
( = goodbye audio skips :-) ) on a PII class machine +EIDE disks, even under
the highest load.
We can only hope that these enhancements get into mainstream kernel before 2.4.
Just because this enhancement opens up Linux to a new, big class of
realtime-audio/video apps.
regards,
Benno.
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