Anyone using SSD harddrives?

[tackle]

I'm building a audio recording/editing rig for a friend, and I'm considering going for a SSD (Intel X25-M 80GB) drive for the OS and Logic Pro.

 

Has anyone else made the jump to SSD, and operate in the audio world? How are your impressions of it; is it worth it, does it make any noticeable differences?

[Cebit]

I've switched to SSDs for the OS on most of my systems. It feels like surfing on a rocket !

[ocZZZ]

I have moved to SSD for snow leopard and it's perhaps the single best upgrade I've put into a system in the last 10 years. Simply amazed more people aren't moving over to this.

[leonthelion]

I have moved to SSD for snow leopard and it's perhaps the single best upgrade I've put into a system in the last 10 years. Simply amazed more people aren't moving over to this.

 

I'll second that.

 

I have the Intel X25-M G2, one of the fastest CONSUMER grade SSDs. Not too expensive @ about $220.

 

Performance is amazing in my desktop.

 

At first, I tried it in my Acer Aspire A150 Netbook hackintosh, but it couldn't make that machine fast enough to use for work.

 

Putting it into my Desktop Celeron D 1.8 machine with 4GB RAM and a GeForce 8600+ 256MB made a big performance leap from the old 7.2kprm S-ATA which was in it and making lots of crunching noise...

 

Here are the before and after Xbench scores for the drive:

 

S-ATA:

 

Full Xbench - 91.4

Disk Xbench - 46.33

 

X25-M:

 

Full Xbench - 115.95

Disk Xbench - 230.48

 

Pretty amazing performance upgrade. Now the bottleneck is my CPU for the first time since PII days (wouldn't playback DVDs without like a PIII 500 I think...)

[Firechild]

As long as they are soooo expensive they are useless. I need 6 TB of HD space so I have to wait a little bit more until they cost approx USD 200/ 1TB

[leonthelion]

As long as they are soooo expensive they are useless. I need 6 TB of HD space so I have to wait a little bit more until they cost approx USD 200/ 1TB

 

the idea is to use them for booting from as they are insanelyfast

 

if you want 6TB of storage (and I'm sure you're backing that up with another 6TB, right??), then hook those up as storage. there's no reason you should be booting off the same volume which holds 100's of GBs of data, its totally risky and a pain to move your data around each time you need to tinker with your OS...

[Oczo]

Indeed, and it is quite fast (60GB Mac Edition OCZ Vertex). Most people won't need more than a 60GB SSD for their boot volume if they are just going to run OS X and their applications on it. You can get several Thermaltake BlacXs, SATA hard disks, a USB hub, and an AirPort Extreme base station and hook everything up over the network so you can access all data from anywhere in your home. You can configure the disks for secure access, if that is an issue.

[VooD]

I myself would move to SSD...except for this:

 

Google: "SSD performance degradation"

[Oczo]

@VooD

 

Well, this can be true to some extent, but it really depends on which SSD type you have. You could make the same argument for hard disks since they HAVE to be defragmented to maintain performance, although SSDs are NOT supposed to be defragmented because it will shorten the drive's life. I have experienced only a slight performance degradation over time and it was easily solved by reformatting the hard disk and reinstalling the OS (which doesn't take very long to do on a good quality SSD). Again, the degradation never was significant enough to prompt me to reinstall on its own, but it is a simple solution in cases where there is significant degradation in performance.

[bonestonne]

Here's my take on the matter, having worked with DAWs for quite some time (owning two at the moment).

 

If you run your OS and apps off your SSD, you've got a recipe for high performance, the apps will work well, all plugins will perform very quickly, and you'll see almost no lag* while you're working.

 

If you run your OS, apps and TEMP file on your SSD, you've got a recipe for disaster. Solid State Drives are like very big, industrial type flash drives. They have a write limit, where after some time, the drive loses performance, and starts to degrade, and reformatting and reinstalling your OS will have no effect whatsoever in trying to remedy the situation.

 

*This will depend on how many tracks you're working with at any given time. There's definitely a point where even a SSD wont help you gain performance.

 

It's really down to how you treat it. Solid State is the future for hard drives, but the technology is not as settled as mechanical drives is. While the early adopters are giving the real world performance updates, and providing companies with the knowledge that they wouldn't have been able to test for, the format is still buggy, and unless you really want to be on the bleeding edge of technology, go for a Velociraptor, or a normal Raptor...of if need be, drop a dime on 15k RPM SAS drives, and run them in a RAID setup.

 

Data recovery from a SSD will also be very different, so if the machine goes down, recovering data could be hard. I've been toying with low power computing lately, hitting the 40W mark, so I'm not looking into Solid State so much as embedded platforms. I've also been looking at Solid State alternatives rather than Solid State itself, but working with DAWs, that's what I can tell you about that.