Solid State Hard Drives??

[piaknowguy]

I'm thinking of building a computer and just wondering if anyone here is using a solid state drive as their secondary audio hard drive, for example. If so, what are your thoughts regarding performance etc? Do you find them worth the additional cost?

Thanks!
PiaKnowGuy
Film Score Demo

PiaKnow

[Artemiy]

I thought you planned to... you know... get a... you know what.

[dbijoux]

I was just looking at these Intel SSDs.

http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/productinformati...

The Extremes are fast enough, but only 64GB. The Mainstream comes in 160GB but is a throwback to ATA100 speeds for writes; still that should be sufficient for most tracking at home. Latency is amazingly fast compared to disk drives, but I have to wonder how well they do in the real world, reading/writing at the same time (w/different rates).

Rain Store has the Intel X25-M as an option for the OS drive in their Pro Studio package, but SATA-300 for audio/sample drives.

@ 400USD / 64GB, that's about $6/GB. You can get a Terrabyte drive under $100 ( .10/GB) so there's a huge difference in price, for now.

I think the only thing they are really good at is being quiet. I 'd seriously consider one for a laptop studio only because I'm curious how much they would reduce EM noise.

Although, another high point for SSD is they're rated more than 1million hours!!! That's about 9 times more than the moving parts on a disk.

[vox]

However, intensive write duty (which is typically the case of any recording DAW) will greatly reduce the lifespan of any SSD.

I was in the same thinking lately : switch to a Mac Pro, or update my PC (also pondering for SSD.)

Finally, before deciding to do the great leap (of faith), I decided to give Windows Seven a chance and only bought another 500GB hard drive along with the OS.

What a difference ! Ok, I was running Vista 32bit, so most of the difference came from Seven, I guess (and the fact that, the 64bit version can also address all my 4GB of RAM), but since I still use my existing 500GB as the audio storage volume and since the OS resides on the new disk, there are no concurrent accesses and the whole system runs very smoothly.

Conclusion : no need for a Mac, nor for a SSD. In fact, SSD would only have speed up the boot time, but since the system already boots in less than 20 seconds, it is of no need. And one must add that Seven made a dramatic progress in handling the sleep mode, so there even is no need anymore to halt/boot the system.

There is also another "trick." Since Windows LOVES preventive memory pages swapping (even if there still is free RAM available), there is the possibility to attach an USB memory stick and ask Windows (in the drive properties) to use it as a "Readyboost" device. The swap file will then reside on the USB stick, resulting in less hard drive accesses and faster access times.

And last thing : the "RAM" switch for any audio clip in Ableton Live is a killer function ! When there are too many audio track playing simultaneously (thus resulting in many random access on the same hard drive), put the ones that plays the most (often the loops) in RAM, and voilà ! I know that any modern SATA3 device can handle tens of audio track streaming, but this little function will increase the lifespan of the disk and also reduces the hard drive noises when it seeks for data.

I finally ended up with my dream DAW, with all of those little changes and really wonder why I didn't made them before !

[SammyJames]

I agree with you on Windows 7. I have found that it has made life a lot easier for me as well.

Also, I would love to have some SSDs, and I believe that my next computer will have them. But I also had to purchase a standard HD; I was in the market for one last year, and I got a Seagate Barracuda with a 32 MB buffer. That makes a big difference, because it allows more data to be transferred at a greater speed. It is only 7200 RPM, but it feels like a 10K drive.

- Sammy

P.S. And a quick scan of Google just now affirms that sizes of 64MB caches are also available now. No clue how large the cache will get -- it depends on whether memory becomes cheap enough, and whether SSDs don't just take over the market eventually.

P.P.S. The talk about writing to SSDs as "shortening the lifespan" of said devices is overstated. It would take you about 20 years or more to burn through such a device. By that time, technology will certainly supercede existing drives. And if not, then you can always buy a new one.

[Nord72]

First of all, there are two type of SSDs - SLC and MLC

http://prohardver.hu/dl/cnt/2010-06/61939/picz/slcmlcbit.png

Another important diff. is the controller itself (depends on wear leveling!)
Intel, Indilinx, Samsung, JMicron, Toshiba, SandForce, Micron

http://prohardver.hu/dl/cnt/2010-06/61939/picz/dynstat2.jpg

And there is TRIM (newer models already support it) Win7 needs it to optimize the speed of the SSD.

SSD transfer rate with TRIM

http://prohardver.hu/dl/cnt/2010-06/61939/picz/bef_usesm.png

SSD transfer rate without TRIM

http://prohardver.hu/dl/cnt/2010-06/61939/picz/af_usesm.png

And there is partition alignment which is also very important (performance)

You can check at any time the actual available condition (lifetime) of the drive

http://prohardver.hu/dl/cnt/2010-06/61939/picz/crys_int...

Now here comes the BEST part of the SSD ( versus HDD)

http://prohardver.hu/dl/cnt/2010-06/61939/picz/ns_lin.png

Before you can use any SSD card you need a motherboard with Bios supporting AHCI. (it must be turned ON)

You need to turn off defrag, prefetch, superfetch and indexing on the SSD drive.
And allocate to ramdisk the browser cache and always left at least 20% FREE SPACE on the drive (to enhance its lifetime).

Finaly a table with the SSD drives actually on the market.

http://prohardver.hu/teszt/mindent_az_ssd-krol/ssd_tabl...

PS. : the COD number is almost as important as the read/write seq.transfer rate, with a low COD number you will get an almost non-usable SSD !!!

[SammyJames]

Nord72:

This is an absolute wealth of information. Thank you for posting it. Now I know what I'm spending reading this afternoon.

- Sammy