Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Drew Sanford on April 9, 2011 at 4:35pm

I wouldn't use SSD drives for recording. Now, if you have a big sample collection - yeah, sure. The thing you get from an SSD drive is very reduced seek times. Unfortunately, the cost is still VERY high on these drives, and at present, I wouldn't trust anything but Intel drives. As a system drive, SSD is very good, it will reduce you boot times to almost nothing. It also helps a lot if you run out of available ram and start swapping.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Pete Warren on April 9, 2011 at 6:40pm

Well, I'm running 16 GB RAM in my machine.  So running out of RAM is a rare issue for me.  But for about the same cost, I could bump my machine up to 32 GB of RAM instead of buying a 500GB SSD, I believe.  Question is, which is a greater value?  I'd also guess the SSD would run a lot quieter and use less energy.  You're right, they're a bit on the pricy side at the moment.  

I have about 1 TB of samples in my library.  All spread across the two extra bays in the machine.  So Drive 1 is a system drive, drive 2 a record drive, drive 3 & 4 are library drives.  I typically run quite a few libraries at a time.  So I'm wondering if two drives in place of the SATAs would drastically improve my ability to run multiple samples from a single drive in any given instance.  

 

Also, I'm just plain curious if anyone has tried to use one as a record drive.

 

That make sense?

 

Drew Sanford said:

I wouldn't use SSD drives for recording. Now, if you have a big sample collection - yeah, sure. The thing you get from an SSD drive is very reduced seek times. Unfortunately, the cost is still VERY high on these drives, and at present, I wouldn't trust anything but Intel drives. As a system drive, SSD is very good, it will reduce you boot times to almost nothing. It also helps a lot if you run out of available ram and start swapping.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Drew Sanford on April 10, 2011 at 2:46pm

Well, the short answer, I've not, nor do I know anyone, who has used an SSD drive as a recording drive. I'll back up my next statement with technical background - I spent 12 years in the IT industry designing the highest reliability lowest cost systems some very impressive, powerful, and smart people have ever run across. The reason I don't know of anyone that's tried to use an SSD drive as a recording drive that it's just not cost effective.

If you want a faster, quieter, cooler, more efficient system drive, go for it. If you want something that will pull more samples faster out of your libs - you know what a 50%-70% performance boost would be worth to you better than anyone else does, so it ends up being down to you to determine if it's worth it to you. They are significantly faster for things like reading samples - especially multiple samples at the same time - because the seek time for the heads to find the right location on the platters of a regular hard drive is the major handicap there, and SSD drives simply don't face that issue - no heads, never mind platters.

Recording won't make sense until the price is way down though. Currently much higher capacity drives can be had for a fraction of the cost, and recording generally allows you to right a fairly unified (if interleaved) stream of data, so you don't have a lot of head movement wasting time.

 

I hope that helps you some.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jim Daneker on May 7, 2011 at 11:25pm

Hey Pete,

 

Just now seeing this thread.  Bottom line, at this point in time your money is better spent on other peripheral improvements.  To be more specific, for the price of one 500 GB SSD, you could get a SATA host card, an external SATA chassis and fill it with 4 WD Caviar Blacks with 64 MB buffers and come out WAY ahead in the sample streaming game.

 

Unfortunately for those of us on the Mac side of the fence, there are issues with certain sample streaming engines (cough "East West PLAY") as well as some hardware bottlenecks that simply don't allow us to take full advantage of SSD speeds yet.  Yes, you would see SOME improvements, particularly for Kontakt-format libraries, but not enough to justify putting all your eggs in that basket for now.  Spinning magnetic disks are still the tech-du-jour for sample streaming.

 

My main machine is also a 3-year-old 8-core with 16 GB RAM, and I also have 2 slave Macs.  The 8-core and one of the slaves are each tied to 4-bay SATA chassis filled with drives, and I've put a lot of thought into how my libraries are allocated.  Bottom line, my Logic scoring template contains 300 VI tracks, all pointing to Kontakt, PLAY and VSL formatted stuff hosted in Vienna's Ensemble Pro.   I've been running this way for over a year now, and it's FLAWLESS.

 

It won't be long until SSD's become the norm, and by all means if you have the money it certainly won't hurt to use them - but their cost simply isn't justified yet.  As for using them as recording drives, you have to be careful on the Mac side about older ones (research the "Trim" issue) - but OWC's Mercury Extreme line are phenomenal contenders and you don't have to worry about the limited write cycle issue with those.

 

Anyhoo - hope that helps!

 

Jim D.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Joe Pasquale on May 31, 2011 at 12:49pm

i am using ssd drives for my libraries- including my Hollywood strings library which is close to 400GB-  don't know how much of an performance upgrade because i have been on since acquiring the library- 

 

if you are using VSL or other substantial libraries i believe you will notice some improvements but primarily on the next gen of quadcores which feature substantially increased buss speeds

 

i am planning on upgrading all my primary work drives- in the next few months

• ▶ Reply