Anyone using Solid State Hard Drives yet?

[DCrippa]

Wow thanks for posting that - that is good to know. Gonna stick with my raptors...

[@?,*???&?]

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"

http://blog.superuser.com/2011/02/10/th ... f-the-ssd/

Has your thumb drive ever gone bad?

[casey campbell]

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"

http://blog.superuser.com/2011/02/10/th ... f-the-ssd/

Has your thumb drive ever gone bad?

Yes.

Also, there's a BIG difference between writing in real time via a daw, running multiple tracks for several hours at a time, and putting a few pics or a doc on a thumb drive.

I am in IT and have seen several thumb drives fail.

[@?,*???&?]

Speaking of going bad, OCZ Technology got caught on two counts last week:

1. Apparently their CEO has a criminal history that has never been disclosed

2. They had been over-stating their earnings

This caused the stock to plummet from over $10 a share down to around $6.80 at it's worst. It's rallying, but still isn't over $8 right now.

[KoffeeKommando]

I heard OCZ was shady WAY back in the day. Then all of a sudden they are everywhere. Now Apple is buying their parts? Maybe the products are ok but who knows? Here is a Newegg review of the "top of the line SSD" from OCZ.

"Pros: Original Vertex2 60gb is a great drive, FAST, RELIABLE, Has all current technologies for extended life expectancy and Garbage Collection, TRIM.

Cons: I Did NOT recieve an Original Vertex2, of the two drives I just purchased I recieved drives that OCZ Misrepresents as Vertex2 SSD's, the specs listed at site of purchase are those of Original Vertex2 although the 2 drive I recieved are 25 - 33% slower than the drives I ordered. I DON'T THINK THIS IS NEWEGGS FAULT, I think OCZ is the responsible party. OCZ replaced NAND in drive, went from 32NM NAND to less expensive 25NM NAND, which changed performance dramatically but did not bother to inform the consumer nor didthey bother to update sales specifications the retailers have to trust as being accurate and ultimately HONEST. That was not the case."

Many people caught on I hear...


Anyway, write speeds are normally slower with SSD.

And they will not last forever. I've had thumb drives die too. They are for temp use only.

[DCrippa]

That is crazy! How can they do business like that and still remain?

[KoffeeKommando]

That is crazy! How can they do business like that and still remain?

I think your sig sums it all up. OCZ would be wise to listen to ya!

"Just because you can doesn't mean you should."

[Brian Brock]

been using an intel x25v for a year. i use it as data drive and a few years old seagate 2.5 inch drive for os. no problems here.

i use the ssd as data because i had trouble getting win xp to install on it. also the laptop drive seemed to be a bit slow for data drive, and as os it's fast enough for me. the ssd rarely passes one percent on the use meter.

i went this route because the computer is fanless, so hard drive noise was the last impediment to a totally silent computer. when i move to win 7 i will go all solid state.

no issues with drive failure. i tried and didn't like ocz vertex.

[Brian Brock]

i back up and store everything on regular disks so failure and cost per gigabyte are not big issues.

[@?,*???&?]

been using an intel x25v for a year. i use it as data drive and a few years old seagate 2.5 inch drive for os. no problems here.

I suspect this is overwhelmingly the case. This argument shouldn't get all 'beta vs. VHS' or 'tubes vs. solid state'.

[Electricide]

so, a few years on now....

It would make sense to me to have a slow, low power HD for bootup and storage, and an SSD for "in progress" tracking and mixing projects.

But I've read other people making the SSD the boot/apps disc and spinny drives as audio drives, which seems counterintuitive to me, but just wondering how people are doing it for audio these days.

[jamoo]

here's a something i copied from another site:

"This one major limitation of the SSD technology presents some problems:

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?

Depending on the operating system that a SSD is being used, a way around wasted space is through usage of ?cache?. This is done by writing smaller files or fragments of larger files to a cache and then actually written to the blocks. This helps to reduce wasted space.

Other limitations of SSD technology are:

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"

http://blog.superuser.com/2011/02/10/th ... f-the-ssd/

In comparison to traditional hard drives? USBs?

[Brian Brock]

so, a few years on now....

It would make sense to me to have a slow, low power HD for bootup and storage, and an SSD for "in progress" tracking and mixing projects.

But I've read other people making the SSD the boot/apps disc and spinny drives as audio drives, which seems counterintuitive to me, but just wondering how people are doing it for audio these days.

I think outside of audio people like the SSD as a boot drive because everything happens right away - I have a laptop with a tiny old SSD and Windows 8, which boots so fast I rarely bother with "sleep" anymore.

If your audio hard disc is a bottleneck then an SSD is a good replacement, but I think it would be pretty rare that a modern 7200 rpm hard drive couldn't handle an audio project.

The real advantages of the SSD are that it's more reliable, and totally silent.

[trevord]

some things to note
both technologies (magnetic and ssd) have geometries that are so small they are both plagued with inherently unreliable material sections (can you say quantum effect of electrons lining up in single file)
but
that's only the material section - the DEVICEs are designed to overcome this - for example the error correction code in a magnetic hdd uses large amount of redundant bits to make up for the inherent errors in reading a tiny magnetic signal
in addition
disk blocks in a magnetic hdd are automatically marked as dead when certain parameters are measured to indicate unreliable performance.

As a matter of fact the storage quoted for the device is not the total storage of the media - but a much smaller calculated value including the errors and reliability taking replacement of disk blocks over the typical life of the device

All of the above applies to ssd - there is always replacement of blocks where parameters indicate the block has a problem - this is done automatically..

the "quality" of the drive is determined by how much redundant storage is included to take care of expected errors - this is reflected in the price
for example a ssd drive from a "cheap" manufacturer will use the same tech but only provide 25% redundant storage for reliability (a 32G drive actually has 40G)
a "quality" manufacturer will provide 100% redundant storage to increase reliability (a 32G actually has 64G)
The same applies to hdd

One way to see how the disk manufacturers are feeding the fan boys for the old tech is to note how many new products they have which are hybrid (hdd with ssd cache) - if ssd was so unreliable wouldn't that make their nice hdd devices unreliable

One thing to note if you are running ssd without the latest os and/or drivers you WILL kill them - old school os and drivers beat on ssd in exactly the worst way for the technology - if you go ssd - you must get the drivers/os which can recognize them and treat them differently than hdd

[Electricide]

well my 7200 sata drive stuggles, but that's 10 years old, an 8MB cache drive on an XP machine.

If you guys are saying that in modern DAW with, say, 88.1 files, current 6GB sata drives are fine then I could stick with spinny drives.