Anyone using Solid State Hard Drives yet?

[mrc]

I'm dual booting from both my Lenovo T61/4 gigs and Amd 980/Sabertooth 990/32 gigs with varied memory ram 7200 drives in both and varied SSD's in both. I can say the SSD's kick ass as "C" drives. I track to usb with my lappy and internal WD Blacks on my rackmount. YMMV.

[Osumosan]

In my case, I just replaced my main internal drive with an SSD with enough capacity for tracking (to be backed up later). I use Logic on 10.6.8 and I can tell you that there's no more of that "waiting until the computer's ready to go" after I press play. Loving it. I'm almost like, "Damn, computer, I'm not ready yet. Hold your horses."

Happy.

[Patanjali]

- Only 4Kb blocks can be erased at a time.
- Changes to data cannot be overwritten, but is rather written as ?new? data
- Blocks can (and usually do) have cells that are not used thus wasting ?space?
Wear ? only a certain amount of write/erases can be performed before data corruption
Longevity ? SSD?s cannot be stored for significant amount of time (data will be lost through dissipation of the stored electrons)
After heavy usage SSD?s, will degrade over time and lose their performance"

Some clarifications required are:
- While MLC SSDs have a write lifecycle limitation of 10,000 per cell, no data is corrupted because the cell is still able to be read, but is removed from the write pool when 'erased'. The result is that the effective size of the drive is reduced, but no data is lost. Wear-levelling algorithms make sure that the writes are spread evenly over the free space of the drive, which means it is good to have enough free space, in addition to whatever the manufacturer has 'hidden' as part of the pool. That is, data for blocks being 'written' are actually placed in a block from the currrent free pool.
- For DAWs, takes are made and then sit around for days at least, though some may be edited. Any single block, if it was actually rewritten to rather than elsewhere, would only have a few writes a day, at most. 10,000 writes = 5 per day for 5.5 years. Basically, unless doing heavy database accesses at enterprise lovel, most SSDs will last years. If they ever start losing blocks, use them as sample drives and get some new faster SSDs. This is much cheaper than getting SLC SSDs, which have 100,000 lifecycles per cell.
- Data is stored as 128kB blocks, which must be written all at once. When a block has to be updated, the whole block is read, the relevant sector updated, and the whole block is written out. If sectors are small, there can be many writes to update a block - called 'write amplification'.
- For multimedia files, I always suggest using 64kB sectors, rather than the default 4kB of Windows. Even for HDDs, copying several GBs of mixed size files is 30-50% faster with 64kB sectors. The 'lost' space for audio files is 0.5% and 8% for general files, like those on the OS drive.[/quote]

[Patanjali]

One of the criticisms of using SSDs for OS drives was that all the little writes to the page file (disk cache of 'resting' programs and data to free up RAM) would blow the lifecycles of blocks.

Well, MS telemetry data (what the machines report) is that page file accesses consist of lots of little reads and less frequent 1MB writes, which means that it is aggregating potential writes in RAM until it has enough for a big write.

MS therefore states that an SSD is perfect for using for holding the page file, especially given their far superior access times and transfer rates.

In fact, it is the significantly superior access and transfer rates that Windows uses to determine if a drive is an SSD, so that it won't defragment them, but allow them to have their erase-marked blocks reset using the TRIM command instead.

Note that the TRIM command just does an offline reset of blocks en masse instead of doing it just before each individual block is to be written to. If you turn on your Win 7/8 machine and don't use it for 30 minutes, it will automatically TRIM all SSDs.

[vvv]

Strikes me that you might want to put your page file on a different drive than the root?

[Electricide]

I am using just one 256 GB ssd in my new build.

First, the page file only gets used when memory is used up. with 16GB memory, I'm not sure it'll ever get used in my system. I'll run one of my session and watch the memory usage. I may be able to just disable the page file altogether. We'll see.

second, everyone still says "keep your audio files on one drive, samples over here, OS over here". well, a 7200 rpm drive can stream 24 tracks just fine. HDD are about 120 MB/s, the SSD is 4 times that at 450 MB/s, so it still has plenty of headroom for everything else. The SATA III connector on the motherboard can handle around 600MB/s, so it's not like there's a bottle neck.

"some say" that SSDs have a problem with extended read, like a bunch of 4 minute audio files would require, but I haven't seen anyone show this in practice...

oh, of course completed projects and everything are backed up to USB drive and NAS.

[roscoenyc]

thanks for the report!

[Osumosan]

Streaming audio files for a mix is one thing, but DAWs will often allocate a large amount of disc space before a take. With 16 or so tracks armed for basics, you could potentially see the computer grind away for quite a while before a record command engages. With the SSD, that lag is pretty much gone.

And don't discount reboot times, launch times, insert instantiations. All those have been cut down for me.

[Electricide]

I'm only recording 2 tracks at a time

I was getting disk and memory warnings while mixing. midi drums, mellotron samples, reverb plugs, etc, that was my issue.

[Electricide]

took all of 8 minutes for windows 8 to not install correctly. UEFI vs legacy options, installing from a USB, but that's not FAT32, formatting drive for GTS instead of MBwhateverTF.

Ug. Dumb. Have to find a sata dvd drive.

edit: DVD drive, worked fine. up and running.

[ashcat_lt]

I'm going to SSD as a "working audio data" drive as soon as I can get a couple hours to fuck with it. It's going to require moving some stuff around on the disks which are currently installed and... I'm looking forward to a huge improvement over my nearly full, probably fragmented HDD.

Since I'm still on XP32 bit, and have 8G of RAM, I use RAMDisc to put my page file in the half of the RAM that Windows can't use.