DAW's and Solid State Hard Drives (SSDs)

[gr0nt]

Just bought a new solid state hard drive for my DAW. Holy Frackinshart!
How did I ever manage without one?

Ableton Live 8 Suite now loads in less than 6 seconds, like from the time u click until the default set loads. down from OVER A MINUTE. Adobe Photoshop CS3? click it, and the program is ready to use before I can say the 'two' in "two-one-thousand". It used to take about 20-30 seconds. Only thing I changed was the hard drive. (running windows 7). Old drive was a 7200.12 Seagate 1TB, 32MB cache. Even 2x of these in a RAID0 was like old ppl fucking compared to my new SSD.

Matter of fact, since both drives are still present in the system, I'm going to make a video of Windows 7 boot times, Ableton load times, loading a set, Photoshop load times, and Windows 7 shutdown time, comparing between the two. Any interest?

Freezing a 24/96 track in ableton? no longer requires a smoke break.


Basically, in my eyes, your DAW is obsolete and shit unless you're running one. Gonna get flamed for that prolly, but the truth hurts. Make it a priority.

So in short, and I'm sure I'll add to this later:

Solid State Hard Drives - worth their weight in gold for EDM producers.

The speed of these things is fucking ridiculous. So ridiculous, in fact, that I've opted to buy a second SSD, the same as the first, to run in a RAID-0 configuration. 7200 (spinny discs) still present for imaging the SSD raid, etc.

It's fucking stupid to buy a 2^16 core processer and 500 petabytes of RAM and then have your OS and Ableton load from a spinning disk. Just sayin.

http://www.microcenter.com/single_produ ... id=0351760 -- Lucky for us yanks!

[deadly_habit]

once they've been out a while longer and failure rate and stabilty figures are more available i'll be sold, till then though bit risky if you ask me for valuable data like OS

[Genevieve]

Yeah, I was planning to get an SSD for my DAWs and OS next time I put together a PC and get perhaps one or two HDDs for files. Which will probably in 6 months or so, when they're expected to drop in price and gain in stability.

[Pedro Sánchez]

once they've been out a while longer and failure rate and stabilty figures are more available i'll be sold, till then though bit risky if you ask me for valuable data like OS

This. Looking forward to the performance boost though.

[gr0nt]

Deadly, I promise im not a salesman, anymore.

That's why I image my SSD every 24hours to a "spinny platter". Or rather, Windows 7 does it automatically for me every 6:30am. That way, if an SSD fails, I can re-image to a traditional HD, reboot, and get my SSD replaced under warranty, all without too much downtime. Your SSD fails, you're literally back up and running within 2 hours. Don't be skeeerd!

I would place all bets that when the data does come, it will show that platter drives die far more frequently than SSD's. Spinny disks is simply an inferior technology with more moving parts to go wrong.

but honestly, I don't get where all this "riskyness" comes from. We've had USB flash drives for almost 10 years now. How many times do they die or lose data (when ejected properly)? In 10 years of seeing these things in use, being a PC tech, I've seen that happen a grand total of ONE time. Same exactly technology, NAND flash, just more of it in a new package with a faster interface.


Just my two cents.

[gr0nt]

And by the way:
In 1995, M-Systems introduced flash-based solid-state drives.[12] They had the advantage of not requiring batteries to maintain the data in the memory (required by the prior volatile memory systems), but were not as fast as the DRAM-based solutions.[13] Since then, SSDs have been used successfully as HDD replacements by the military and aerospace industries, as well as for other mission-critical applications. These applications require the exceptional mean time between failures (MTBF) rates that solid-state drives achieve, by virtue of their ability to withstand extreme shock, vibration and temperature ranges.[14]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSD#Flash-based_SSDs


Not exactly a brand new technology. It think 16 years is probably enough time to have ironed the bugs out.

[Genevieve]

Yeah, I hear a lot of problems about stability so often that I'm guessing it's true, but it never made sense to me seeing as they have less moving parts. If the stability issue is bullshit, I'm quite prone to believe that.

[deadly_habit]

yea but consumer based ssd is new and we all know consumer grade = cheaply made

[gr0nt]

And your seagate/WD you got in there now is.... industrial grade?

already on the third generation of SSD... I believe Intel released G3 just yesterday. As I keep saying, first manufactured 16 years ago, now on the 3rd generation of the technology. How many Generation's do you need to feel comfortable, I guess is my question?

Sata I was good, Sata II was good, Sata III is good. My SATA I hard drive has been running five years now, and that was a 'new technology' when I got it. Just can't see where you're coming from at all on this. Respect tho.

[daft cunt]

Yeah I also thought about buying one. That was before I knew about the price tho.
I'd rather explore patience than pay 100 € for 40 Go.

[deadly_habit]

And your seagate/WD you got in there now is.... industrial grade?

already on the third generation of SSD... I believe Intel released G3 just yesterday. As I keep saying, first manufactured 16 years ago, now on the 3rd generation of the technology. How many Generation's do you need to feel comfortable, I guess is my question?

Sata I was good, Sata II was good, Sata III is good. My SATA I hard drive has been running five years now, and that was a 'new technology' when I got it. Just can't see where you're coming from at all on this. Respect tho.

it's tried and true tech
believe me i was debating it and prolly will sometimes soon, just wanna be sure since my uncle had a few fail on the networks he admins (thankfully in RAID clusters)

[gr0nt]

Yea, but how many platters did your unc have fail in the same time frame on the same network? That would be a more realistic comparison. That's the important info missing here.

I bet it was at least 'a few', or more. Got to put it in a frame of reference yeah?
You've never had a platter drive die? Consider yourself the exception not the rule.

Point is - all hard drives WILL DIE eventually, just like people. Are you imaging your SATA 7200's regularly? You're a fool if you don't, unless you actually want your data gone forever. Backup of some sort? Well the same applies to SSD. Image, backup, RAID, whatever. Just like you would a normal drive. SSD's have the same warranty as platters, 3 years. If it dies, you do the same thing you do if you have a platter, return it for warranty service, and pray that your backups work. So the only "against" I can think of is based on Price. Very expensive, sure I get that. Unstable, unstable compared to what, platters? That's pure bullshit put out by companies like WD and Seagate that are about to lose all of their business. (they make platters not NAND Flash, so when platters become obsolete they're fracked)

I guess I'm so pumped cuz im a homeowner, a fulltime student, with a job, so literally every second I have free counts. If I got a badass system that has to wait for platters to spin, well thats just a waste of my GD time, and my GD clock cycles.

Your DAW is only as fast as it slowest component. I'm claiming that SSDs make my system feel at least 5 times faster with the same components.

SATA I was NOT a tried and true tech when it was released, because older interfaces were Parallel, SATA is serial. Sure they're both platters, but the interface is totally different as well as the platters themselves (size, number, density) Different controllers (which had to be invented from skratch), different encoding. Totally different animals, SATA was essentially BRAND NEW. Yet my SATA I drive works a charm to this day. Just slow as hell

To rephrase my bottom line:

SSD's... The cheapest way to get a serious performance boost from your DAW. 100$ on an SSD will get u way more performance than any other 100$ peripheral you could add/upgrade. And worth their weight in gold of course. (come on ppl throw me a bone, they dont weigh all that much)

I'll say it again. When the reliability data comes out for second generation SDD's, I'm placing all bets on platters being less reliable, with a higher failure percentage, and a lower MTBF. I've had a shitload of platter HDs die on me in my day, they suck, and I can't wait until I never have to use one again.

[deadly_habit]

i'm drunk and too lazy to make a real point so...

[gr0nt]

You win.


SSD's suck.


edit: hahha i have a feeling you're not too lazy to make a point, but that your too lazy to read my rambling. I don't blame you

[looney]

are you sticking all your samples and VSTs on your SSD too?

i've been thinking of buying something small and cheap(er), putting the essentials on it and keeping the rest on spinners but i don't know if that will actually have much of an effect

[gr0nt]

Yes, definitely installed all of my VST's to the SSD's.

Samples - in my case yes, only because I have the room. I use Ableton, and store any project samples in RAM. So storing them on a super fast hard drive isn't too crucial.

Since the original post I bought another SSD and put 2 in RAID0. 111GB formatted, about $170 total for the pair , and max read/write speeds over 500MB/sec. My second best hard drive (Seagate 7200.12 1TB 32MB Cache) gets a maximum of 120MB/sec. My DAW uses an older motherboard too - ASUS P5B Deluxe. Single SSD drive was about 260MB/sec.

You can really see the difference when starting/closing Ableton, loading huge projects, and when playing dozens of frozen tracks at 24b/96Khz. Of course, starting up and shutting down Windows.

[VirtualMark]

SSD's definitely have some advantages over traditional HDD's. SSD's are a lot faster and a lot more resistant to shock as they have no moving parts. However, at the moment they're a lot more expensive, they actually use slightly more power than HDD's and can only store data to each cell a certain number of times before becoming unreliable. However, as someone else said, a normal HDD will eventually fail, in fact the hard drive is usually the first thing to fail in most pc's, as its one of the few moving parts.

If cost is no option and you wand more performance then SSD is definitely the way to go. However, if you require a lot of storage and aren't too bothered about speed then HDD will be better for you, as larger SSD's get real expensive. As for reliability, i'd suggest getting an imaging program and backing up routinely to an external hard drive, as an hdd can fail at any time.