looong overdue Mac Pro Harddrive question.

[starbearer76]

but i heard that a major recording studio (in their money is no object sort of ways) wanted to know if the new SSD drives actually SOUND better. If what i heard is true, their golden ears could tell the difference and preferred the SSD over the older type when they did a shoot out.

Well, that's the dumbest fucking thing I've heard all month.

-a

Agreed. There's NO WAY that an SSD sounds any different than a mechanical hard drive. It's impossible. An SSD reads and writes data faster than a traditional hard drive, but it's dealing with exactly the same data. It's not like tape, where different formulations have different characteristics. Digital data doesn't work that way. It's just a sequence of ones and zeroes. Doesn't matter what media you store those ones and zeroes on; when it gets loaded into the computer, it's all the same. Anyone who believes otherwise doesn't understand how computers work.

They're physically silent. Maybe the computer was in the same room as the monitors where they did the shootout. A lot of people run like that and it could be a factor in how "they sound" in a shootout.

Never say never.

sorry for that Nolan, i wasn't trying to bump the thread so far off course. all i meant to say is that perhaps a SSD hard drive is worth pondering. that's all.

[John Jeffers]

starbearer76, SSDs are awesome and I would highly recommend them, just not for the reason you mentioned. I have an SSD in my laptop, and it makes a huge, easily noticeable difference in how fast the computer is.

[Nick Sevilla]

Hi,

This is what I have on my system:

250 GB system drive 7200 RPM WD
750 GB backup drive 7200 RPM WD
300 GB audio drive, 10,000 RPM WD Raptor
300 GB audio drive, 10,000 RPM WD Raptor

In addition I have about 5 external FW drives, some LaCie, some mongrels, etc. for moving things around studios. My favorite external drive is a GLyphTech PortaGig 500GB fanless drive with FW800.

Also, I have a 2TB network drive, for nightly backups.

This pretty much covers all the needs.

[exalted wombat]

starbearer76, SSDs are awesome and I would highly recommend them, just not for the reason you mentioned. I have an SSD in my laptop, and it makes a huge, easily noticeable difference in how fast the computer is.

Programs will certainly load faster. Apart for saving a few seconds at that stage, do you see any performance improvement in doing real work?

[John Jeffers]

starbearer76, SSDs are awesome and I would highly recommend them, just not for the reason you mentioned. I have an SSD in my laptop, and it makes a huge, easily noticeable difference in how fast the computer is.

Programs will certainly load faster. Apart for saving a few seconds at that stage, do you see any performance improvement in doing real work?

I'm not using an SSD in my studio computer yet, so I can't comment on how it impacts Pro Tools performance. I have one in my laptop (a Macbook Air), and it makes a difference across the board. Anytime the disk is accessed, you will benefit. It feels faster than my previous Macbook Pro, which was technically a more powerful laptop than the Air. If you compared specs, you'd expect the Macbook Pro to be faster. The SSD makes that much of a difference.

I didn't believe the hype about SSDs until I experienced it. Now, I'm a total convert. The only reason I'm not using them everywhere is because they're still quite expensive compared to traditional disks.

[starbearer76]

well, now that the dust has settled a little bit and if the original author of the thread doesn't mind i wish to take some time to explain what i said before a bit more.

First- "money is no object" that was just a figure of speech. My company has done work for studios who ponder every other year of if they should spend 20 grand on this or 20 grand on that. More to the point, will they chose my companies stuff or someone else's. There are a couple of studios over the past couple of years who have been demoing our stuff. In fact i am pretty sure that it must have been a studio that may have been testing out our gear and it was something related to that that had brought up the hard drive thing.

Second - i wasn't kidding about the ssd drive maybe actually giving a sonic quality to the sound. granted... you would need an especially sensitive top notch monitoring system, specially tuned room, and a few pair of golden ears in the room to be able to pick up on the subtle nuances of something like that. i wasn't implying a night and day thing. it was a subtle perceived difference, and enough difference to prefer one over the other.

please allow me some time to track down who i may have heard it from and what studio and what set of engineers said it, and I'll report back. Hey... i might write back to say yeah... it WAS bullshit. I don't doubt the possibility it being as such. I have experience in my work though to back up the possibility of it being true.

[John Jeffers]

Second - i wasn't kidding about the ssd drive maybe actually giving a sonic quality to the sound. granted... you would need an especially sensitive top notch monitoring system, specially tuned room, and a few pair of golden ears in the room to be able to pick up on the subtle nuances of something like that. i wasn't implying a night and day thing. it was a subtle perceived difference, and enough difference to prefer one over the other.

No. You don't get it. It is IMPOSSIBLE for there to be ANY DIFFERENCE in sound quality between a regular hard drive and an SSD in regards to digital audio data stored on those drives. The only difference is that the SSD will read/write the data more quickly. The data itself is identical. The only way there could be a difference in sound quality is if the hard drive somehow modified the bits stored in the audio files. Drive manufacturers go to great lengths to assure that data is never modified in any way.

If anyone says there is a difference in sound quality, they are either fooling themselves or lying to you. I cannot make it any clearer than that.

If you're just messing with me, congratulations -- you got me riled up. If you're truly ignorant of the facts, then I suggest you do some research before you go around spouting this kind of nonsense.

[starbearer76]

wow... like i said. i'll report back.