Just wanted to get some opinions on whether SSD technology has gotten to the point where it is practical to use one as a sample drive? I would love to see the load times in Kontakt and Omnisphere come down significantly, but the drives sure are pricey.... I am especially looking to hear from anyone who is actually using one currently, about performance specs.

 

It will only work if you already use one ssd for your DAW. I work with 2 ssd's at the moment (m4 corsair), one for daw one for my most used samples. And it makes a big difference in loading times.

If you are looking for faster loading times but you are on a tight budget, it makes more sense to buy just one ssd for your main drive, and use a fast external drive (usb 3 works fast also).

 

What are the sizes and prices of the ones you use? And are you pretty happy with them? How long have you been using them?

 

128 GB each (119 GB is actual size), it costs me about 175 euro per ssd at the time. But I checked the prizes again today, and it's now 140 euro (damn!).

I am really happy with it, never had a crash or other problems with it and I have used it for a year now. There are a lot of ssd's out there that are a lot cheaper, but a lot of them will crash after a few weeks or slow your system down. You should read a lot of reviews before making your purchase.

The m4 or other corsair ssd's have a good reputation and not a lot of problems have been reported, so that's why I bought the m4. I am thinking of buying another one actually, after I saw the prize drop.

Edit: If you are thinking of buying the m4, you should know that a 2,5 inch bracket is not included.

 

I have an SSD in my laptop and it feels faster than my Mac Pro. My Mac Pro is using a striping RAID config. Make sure you get a drive with a NAND chip to extend life and make sure your computer supports it. The speed gain is phenominal and I think you'll be glad you got it. Like Oxilatur said I would use it as youur startup drive before your sample drive unless you can afford both. After installing, your computer will feel brand new.

 

I have a good friend who is a computer geek (several OSes) and he's usually getting the latest technology. Some time ago, he showed me his last setup: 120Gb SSD boot disk plus a 2x 500Gb RAID (=1Tb). This setup seems to give him excelent results on his i7 with 16Gb RAM and Windows 7 64bit. In fact, I am planning to make an upgrade to my main Hackintosh machine... and I'll have an even better setup than his (he'll be helping me). I'll tell you about the real life performance in proaudio situations when the time comes. But my friend says it's a killer!. The only different thing I'll do is get a larger SSD (240 or 256Gb) so there's a boot partition and a "work" partition to hold the current work (=in progress) so it loads fast as hell. Once it's done, I'll finally move it to the 2x 2Tb RAID (4Tb), plus an external backup...

I'll let you know... (It'll take a while, 'cause currently I'm a bit short on money :P )

Best wishes!

 

What sort of a RAID config are you talking about? I don't know too much about it, and will it be external on an external RAID controller, or just off the motherboard? And can someone explain to me how a RAID configuration is faster than the harddrives it is comprised of? That's the part I really don't get, isn't it dependent on spin speed?

 

Good resources, thanks

 

It depends on how you calculate it.

Wrong way:

Why is it wrong? Because seq speeds don't matter in daily use unless you copy gigabytes of data (and even then 2 separate HDDs would be faster than 2 of them in RAID 0).

Also wrong, but more correct:

The truth is somewhere in between. An SSD is much faster then HDDs.
What counts the most are the 4K values. I found a nice screenshot which illustrates it. An HDD doesn't even come close.

 

@ oi oi AudioTiger I'm whining...Why should I swallow a couple of rotational HDD's?

 

http://www.pixmania.co.uk/uk/uk/11863242/art/sandisk/extreme-solid-state-drive.html?srcid=11270&nopopup=1&gclid=CN6o2vbIurECFQRTfAodq38A2w
that's the one im using its amazing

 

due to the fact of omnisphere being about 60gb..no it's not necessary. sample libraries even on a usb 2/3hdd is just fine and having an ssd for the OS is all you need but go for a 128gb so you don't buy 2 60gb ones..i can recommend Kingston SSD, patriot pyro and corsair cause i have all 3 and no problems on the OS. after installing all my important stuff on the music production SSD i still have 47gb still availiable(all my big sample libs/vst are on an external usb 2.0 hdd and the results are still fantastic. or if you buy a 256gb u can split it in 2 partitions and have 2 os..also a good idea. i didn't do that but u would save space in your case and use less cables.

 

I have an 240 SSD as my bootdisk and also for my programs on my MBP.
For my user files, I write those to my extra internal HDD.
My Omnisphere is working from my SSD and loading from my HDD, little wait but still, way quicker than previously with just HDD's *yes* .
What I heard is that over time a SSD "decays" if you write and delete to and from cells on a SSD, so I try to Write and delete on as few ocasions as possible.
Anybody know about this last statement? cause if it's true, it will probably be better not to have a sampler on a SSD,
hence be an answer to the original question of lampwiikk.

 

If you don't already own an SSD I would seriously advise getting one. Boot times are significantly reduced as to are load times for apps installed to the SSD.
I have 16GB of RAM which allows me to install apps to my RAM (using a 3rd part app to create a RAM disk). I have installed Cubase 5 and all of it's content to a RAMdisk and I also install all of my VST's to RAM. There was little need to install Cubase to my RAM as I don't restart it enough to notice a difference but it is nice for halion1 and grooveagent1 (everything loads instantly) but RAM is volatile so you will have to move content to it every time you boot (can be done automatically).

Below is bench results for my ramdisk. If you have the money you could definitely find a use for 32/64GB RAM.

 

Yes I have heard of write wear too but I think this is less of a concern with newer SSD's as they have countermeasures. This isn't really a problem for romplers/sample libraries as they would only write to the SSD at install.

 

For what it's worth:

I use a 500 gb SSD. Its not blazingly fast compared to a SATA HDD in terms of mb/sec.
I tried it as an OS drive, and didn't notice a huge difference in the OS or program loading times.

But for sample libraries its absolutely killer.
Here's my 2 cents as to why...

I had a setup running a full virtual orchestra with full divisi on strings, and regular for horns, woodwinds and percussion.
In total, about 26 tracks. Even distributed across 4 SATA HDDs, it crapped out constantly.

As an experiment, I put everything on the SSD. Now I can run every section in full divisi without a glitch. That equates to about 50 tracks, with room for more from a single drive.

The real difference is in access latency; not how much the drive can transfer in a given time. If you calculate how much all the samples triggered in a given time sends in terms of mb per second, you won't come up with a high figure and most HDDs should easily deal with that if we are talking about constant streaming. But we aren't - we are talking about samples scattered all over a disk being recalled constantly and erratically.

How quickly the samples can be accessed is usually why things crap out.

A RAID will improve this marginally, but it doesn't end up much cheaper than an SSD unless you want terabytes of storage.

For a start, you need to spend at least a few hundred dollars on a decent Hardware RAID card. (Software RAIDs aren't adequate for what I am doing - and probably most sample users)

Then you need lots of drives. All this adds up to a lot of cash.

There is also a mention of SSD wear and tear... I wouldn't even remotely worry about that. That only applies to writing to a disk, not reading from it. In theory, a samples-only SSD will last indefinitely because samples only get read, not written. (Plenty of good articles on lifespans of modern SSDs around)

Finally, if you want a fix-it-all solution, there are now some PCIe SSD raids they are insanely fast. A friend of mine bought a 1TB card that has close to zero latency, and transfers up to 680 mb/sec. (We tested it). Compared to around 260-ish mb/sec for standard SSDs, thats pretty fast.

Check them out here
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe/OWC/Mercury_Accelsior/RAID

 

I wonder if an SSD drive is suitable for large files such as Kontakt libraries, this is over 12 TB of data.
Or it is better and more economical to stay with the old HDDs?

I'm asking because many cheap SSD drives slow down to 60 MB\s after reading a few GB of data.

 

The behavior is normal:
First thing is, all drives use a buffer and when it's full the buffer is flushed to the disk (SSD) and second when SSD get hot they are throttled to protect the cells freom getting destroeyd by excessive heat.

 

Last edited: Feb 13, 2024