solid state hard drives

And I thought I was erring conservative by waiting as long as I did to get an SSD!

I was wary about getting one, but did a lot of research over a few months; talked to friends in post houses and read every test I could find. What I came up with was that SSDs compare very favorably to “spinners”… and there’s no risk in making a small SSD your boot drive-- the number of writes in such a scenario is pretty much insignificant in terms of wearing the drive out.

In my case: I’ve got my OS and applications on a 128 Gig SSD, mirrored from my original HD, which remains online. The SSD holds ONLY the OS and apps-- all of my 200+ gigs of user data are referenced on the original hard drive. That’s where all the re-writing takes place. I still have the OS on the original drive, and there would not be a hiccup nor any lost data should the SSD spuriously blow up. It’s literally a no-risk situation. Sometimes, for a really big project, I’ll keep the session on the SSD (backed up regularly). Another advantage to SSDs is that, should you want to, you can run pretty much everything off of the boot drive with no performance hit.

And in this configuration, whether running the session off of a “spinner” or the SSD, the speed difference is phenomenal. As stated earlier, it’s pretty much like having a new, much faster computer.

There’s an excellent article on SSD reliability in high-stress real world application on Tom’s Hardware dot com-- not sure what the forum rules are these days in terms of including links, but if you do a search for “ssd reliability-failure rate” you ought to be able to find it. Very informative and even-handed.

Considering that if you shop around you can get a 128 Gig SSD for around 85 bucks these days, and factoring in everything reported above, for me it seemed (and has panned out to be) a win-win situation.

And with that, to each his own!

Chewy

As always…

I’ve had one as a boot drive and it died after 5 months of work.
The speed increase was great, but it’s too much hasse for me. I’m back with old fashioned hds now.

Ollie

My first SSD was an ocz agility and it was pretty… weak if I may say. Sometimes no boot, had to recover the boot partition a few times etc.

Since I went with Crucial’s M4, no troubles anymore. These drives screams ! You’re safe with intel as well.
SSDs are cheap now and the performance is nothing but stellar !

It’s a funny thing to observe how conservative audio engineers are… :smiley:

Fair enough - can’t really argue with that.

Modern SSD’s can take about 100,000 writes. Your mechanical hard drive will probably fail long before that, especially if it is set to never sleep. SSD’s don’t need to sleep.

I have had a bunch of OWC SSD’s fail too soon. Lately I have been buying Samsung - 512 GB, 6G drive for around $350 on Amazon.

The performance boost is so dramatic that I would never again spec any computer for my company that didn’t have an SSD boot drive.

I am typing this on a 15" Macbook Pro with 750 GB 6G SSD (Samsung I think). Getting 450 MB/S read and write times. 7200 RPM mechanical drives get about 100 MB/S over internal SATA, maybe more on 6G.

I use to keep projects on a second internal mechanical drive on my Mac Pro, but now I run them from an SSD boot drive and archive them to the other drive.

In two years mechanical hard drives will be dinosaurs.

One thing I’m interested in knowing is will I receive a boost if I have three separate solid state hard drives, one for Nuendo, one for my audio files and one for samples, which is the setup I use now.

Or would it be beneficial to have all audio and samples on the same solid state hard drive as Nuendo?

It shouldn’t matter much whether the data is on separate drives or the same drive. It matters a lot with mechanical drives, because the heads have to seek for data, so it’s better to have one drive seeking for one bunch of data and another drive seeking another, rather than one drive doing all the work. There is no seek time on SSD’s, just the time it takes to read from memory. Although theoretically there might be a slight boost to use more than one drive for different purposes.

But SSD’s are expensive and the largest single drive capacity is limited to 750 or 980 (but the 980’s are really just two 480’s spanned together). The smaller ones are more economical (I mean less money per GB) than the larger ones, but there is no way I could afford to have all of my sound libraries (totaling around 4 TB) and project archives on SSD’s. And I would prefer to keep my project archives on an external mirror RAID for safety reasons.

Having said that, you will likely see a performance boost if you RAID two SSD’s in a RAID 0 (striped) configuration for your boot drive, especially if both are 6G SATA.

Turns out that we need to replace one of our systems, and our DAW builder has recommended us SSD disc.
I was guaranteed that the failure rate of -good- SSD drives ins way under those of regular discs.

Will report back within a couple of days.

Fredo

Depending on your general resting emotional state, Fredo, there’s a good chance you’re gonna freak out!

Chewy

LOL.

What will be the reason to freak out?

Fredo

Well… I know you’re a pretty even-keeled guy… but when I saw how much my computer sped up once I started booting from an SSD I started to question reality more than ever. It was crazy. Or… was I?

It’s ok, the freaking-out thing. Refreshing!

Holding back on emoticon use,

Chewy

Promised to report back on the speed of my SSD driven system.
…but I really can’t at this moment.
Getting dizzy from the speed of this machine. Need to lie down for a while …

More later.

Fredo

Poor guy… I tried to warn you.

Chewy

SSD is the way to go. It is like going from an old analog 15’’ screen to 2x24’’ tft or something like that.

When I built my i7 DAW 2 years ago SSD where quite expensive. So I just used a 128GB drive for the system.
Using 1 TB Seagate drives (50 bucks each) for data - coming from all kind of “Raid0 Raptor” “U2WSCSI” stuff in the past I was impressed how smooth (quiet) and fast those modern hds are. I felt that there is no need to go SSD for data.

But I was wrong - 8 months later the price was way lower, I installed an additional 256GB Vertex 3 - well, and it was like having a new computer. With SSD the harddisc is almost “not there” anymore - it is NOT that you need them for playbacking 500 tracks… a good hd can do that as well… It is the access speed!! This is important when editing, when jumping back and forth with the cursor/playback, when having countless snippets of multitrack drums… And yes, saving time increases big time.

Of course 256GB are not much so I still have 2 x 1TB hd in use, one for sample librarys one for projects. Usually I use the regular hd for work (mastering, regular recording sessions) - if I have the feeling I need more speed I go SSD.

AFAIK the time of dying SSDs is over, be sure to just use quality stuff!!

I installed a 512GB Samsung SSD in my 2011 MacbookPro. WOW!! I had a 750GB hitachi drive in it because 2011 the SSD option was very very expensive. Well, using the MacBook with the SSD is like having a new Computer with fresh installed OS :slight_smile:

Backups are important in any case - with hd or SSD…


Brandy

Hi Brandy, I’ve yet to put my audiodrive on ssd (no big audio projects at the moment), but reading you, I’m tempted.

The only thing holding me back is the size of drives. I’ve got heaps of 1TB drives as media drives, samples, recording, video editing and backups. But it might take a while to get affordable 1TB drives.
In the meantime, I feel like going for two samsung 512gig 830 ssds (audio drive, samples) for an all ssd workstation.

I tried Omnisphere on a laptop with an SSD and it was like a hardware synth ! Schocking loading speed.

Speaking of reliability, Samsung has a warranty of 5 years on their ssd now. In three year time, mechanical hard drives will be like 5" floppies, jazz iomega, syquest 135, tapes…

Yea, Bifop!

Two years ago SSD was expensive as hell, so it made usually only sence to use it for the system. The system usually only needs to read and not to write, so the earlier drives had not that much errors…

Yea, that Samsung drive I installed last week in my MacBook. On Mac you have to use the app “Trim” to enable some features regarding the writing process (to avoid that the same sectors will be used all the time, as far as I understand)

The 256GB SSD was at 700 EUR 2 years ago, I bought in August 2011 for 450 EUR - and now the 500GB Samsung is below 300 EUR. Still a lot of money and there are way more expensive ssds out there - but wait 2 years… In the meantime for “storage” there is no alternative for bigger regular harddrives… 2 TB or even 3 TB… I installed two 3TB WD hds to a NAS the day before yesterday - raid1 - 6TB of storage (when not in raid1) for about 250 EUR - it will took some time that this is realistic with SSD I would think…

FWIW, my DAW builder recommended me to use no other brand than Intel SSD’s.


Fredo

as far as I heard they are very good quality indeed. But quite expensive as well. What are his arguments? Some years ago it was fact that you “have to use Intel CPU and Asus board” for a serious DAW…

A big plus is, that they are (as far as I know, again) supported by the apple computers - other brands need that “trim” application - but this is just “one click” and activates those necessary ssd-features…

And I was advised to use nothing but Samsung. (I got neither). When doing my research before jumping in I saw some discussions about Intel SSDs, and it seems as if they were definitely the superior option early on, but it looks like the others have pretty much caught up, based on reliability and speed tests (and warranties!).

But what can you believe from the internet, anyway???

Chewy