We all know that SSD drives means much faster booting,loading of kontakt libraries

What I have always been wondering is, do SSD drives also help to increase the number of midi and audio track counts in your DAW? Can a DAW handle more fx, vstis kontakt libraries in project when loading from SDDs as opposed to HDDs, assuming the rest of the specs are the same. ( same processor, RAM etc)

If yes, how much more, is it significant or just marginal difference?

 

From my experience it doesn't effect it, since those things are limited by either the daw, or memory and cpu. It also depends on how the SSD is connected internal/external, and what rpm speed a mechanical drive has.

 

I heard people with the new MacBook Pro's saying they can do more tracks.

 

Depends on whether you are pulling or writing files to the drive. For a synth cpu is the biggest issue. For something like nexus, quickly pulling samples from the hdd can help.

 

The most important advantage is that you can decrease a lot the Kontakt buffer size. Of course, only if you have the libraries in the SSD drive.

SSD are faster, and with nearly zero access time. The dream of every Kontakt user.

Returning to the question, if you use heavy Kontakt libraries and you decrease the buffer size you can increase notably the free RAM.

I'm not sure if this guarantees more tracks. There are many factors: CPU, etc

 

Yeah, you need to look at the whole system, but SSD and more RAM will help you.

 

i would say that it does.

Loading vst specially some of the ones that take a little bit longer to load can cause crash or lag.

I notice a big improvement on projects when loading heavy synths and i been able to run more tracks without the need of freeze/bounce as often.

That's just me though..

 

Well, I have a Win 8 machine, I use Presonus Studio One, and have an Intel SSD. I keep my OS, Presonus, some large frequently used sample libraries (like Galaxy Piano), and a few other things on the SSD. I've never noticed any better ability to handle additional tracks than I was able to do prior to buying the SSD. None whatsoever. I do load the large samples almost instantly, which is great. I also have a boot time under 15 seconds which makes my day every time. But no difference at all related handling additional tracks. Honestly, I don't even think it has a thing to do with it. If that's your only reason to invest in a SSD, you might thing twice. However, it's so awesome with the things where it does make a difference, that I'm completely happy that I spent a few bucks on it.

Hope that helps.

 

Regarding recording and playing tracks, the calculation is simple: 1 mono 48KHz/24bit track needs 1152 Kbits/sec of HD throughput, which is 144KB/sec. So 100 mono tracks in 48KHz/24bit quality needs 14,400KB/sec which is 14.4 MB/s. Today's hard disks have speeds of about 80-120 or more MB/sec. The speed varies as hard disk is sometimes 2x faster at the beginning of the platter than at the end of the platter when the disk is full. Let's say your hard disk can do 100 MB/s. That means that it can record and play about 694.4 48KHz/24bit mono audio tracks. That's quite enough, eh?

My point is that it is quite enough and even better to use a HD for recording and playing WAV tracks and SSD is best used for reading huge libraries of samples and SSDs can currently reach reading and writing speeds of over 500MB/s which is an overkill for audio streaming. It's simply better used for something else.

 

For some DAWs such as Cubase, the audio streams from the hard drive. So yeah, it greatly improves the number of audio tracks that Cubase can play. But for other DAWs such as Ableton, you have the option to load the sample into memory, so the SSD doesn't make much difference here. Kontakt also allows you to do this.

If you're low on RAM and have the SSD as a page file, then it also has the potential to speed things up. And overall you'll notice that VST instruments and effects will load faster, projects load and save faster and everything is snappier.

I wouldn't think that it makes any difference to the amount of midi and virtual instrument tracks that you can run though, as this is usually CPU limited.

 

I have two Windows 7 Operating Systems installed and have Ableton installed on both of them. One operating system is installed on my laptops hybrid drive and the other on my laptops second hard drive, which is SSD. I wrote a song in Ableton on the first OS (hybrid) and then played it back on the second OS (SSD). When I played it back on the SSD OS, there were drop outs which weren't shown by the flashing orange light that is usually displayed when the drive is overloading and these dropouts were also present once the arrangement was rendered and also present when i tried to freeze and flatten the sounds that were dropping. My hybrid drive was fine when playing the song and it sounded OK once it had been rendered.

 

Mines work smooth (pc-mac) with whatever heavy duty task it´s executed but I cant compare given the huge improvement from previous setups

 

The hybrid drive won't ever be faster than the SSD. What's probably causing it is your laptops power saving features. Throttlestop can stop your CPU from slowing down when producing. Things like speedstep are designed to save battery but don't help when you need the CPU. It also underclocks system busses and can cause slower SSD performance.

I tested mine and get over 400mb/s, which goes down to 200mb/s when I don't use throttlestop. It's annoying to say the least.