Solid State Drive vs 7200 rpm

[auditory canvas]

My macbook pro actually crashed at festival performance last year, the stage was right next to some huge slamming sub cabinets, and the whole stage was vibrating, I kept getting read/write errors which kept throwing synch out of line, and the whole thing crashed twice. It was my biggest nightmare. Ended up being able to finish the set by sitting my mac on a pillow (no joke).

Good tip - take an isolation foam pad like the ones you get for studio monitors to gigs with you, you never know what you might be faced with in terms of set up space.

I'm looking at getting the new macbook pro 17 with a 128 SSD - the ssd will just be used for OS and applications etc, then I'll be taking out the DVD drive and replacing it with a 500gb 7200 standard drive for storage. That way I'll have 2 internal drives, 1 with good read performance for the OS and apps, and another with most write and save stuff happening on the storage drive. I'll prob just get a portable slim USB DVD writer for occasional use.

[Machinesworking]

Without TRIM support the write times get exponentially slower, ultimately resulting in a HD slower than 7200rpm, and further.
Currently OS X does not support TRIM, so buying a Mac with an SSD, or upgrading the HD to SSD with intention of acheiving faster read.write speeds, will ultimately be shorted lived.

The




OWC drive does this itself. http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal ... glloyd-mpg

Also, unless you know that the Macbook Airs degrade HD wise over time it's possible that they have their own SSDs that don't degrade etc.
Interesting stuff though. After reading about it there's a program that does the equivalent of defragging on SSDs to get rid of this problem.
IMO if you have the money, it's too good of a deal to pass up, I'm certain at this point that 90% of the Live hiccups I get are due to Hard drives being annoying.

[pr0jekt2501]

Without TRIM support the write times get exponentially slower, ultimately resulting in a HD slower than 7200rpm, and further.
Currently OS X does not support TRIM, so buying a Mac with an SSD, or upgrading the HD to SSD with intention of acheiving faster read.write speeds, will ultimately be shorted lived.

The latest firmware for OCZ drives supports trim and GC. GC on OSX keeps the drive running at full speed for writes.

[sdmiddleton]

Ok - so in terms of using a Macbook Pro to run live on stage and play Live synths, use onboard effects etc, whats the better option SSD or 7200? Its all pretty confusing for the end user i think.

need some conclusive persuation!

[sdmiddleton]

If for example you're gonna mount a laptop like this..

http://www.ultimatesupport.com/images/p ... 0_2_LG.jpg

Would you suggest going for the SSD?

[pr0jekt2501]

When playing live its only read speeds that are important, so a SSD will work well which ever one you choose. BTW: It also sounds like you're mainly using soft synths and plugins, so the disk is not a factor in the performance of ableton live. An advantage of SSD if you do a lot of live gigs, is that there are no moving parts, they hold up to rough environments and treatments much better than HDDs.

HDDs and SSDs will both work with that stand without any problems.

[davepermen]

solid state expert here (i have had i think 7 in total, all of them somewhere in a system in use).

first things first: TRIM is not that important. it's nice to have, and hopefully osx adapts it soon. it's sort of an "if i have it i never have to care about anything" sort of thing. but even without it, solid states work awesome, without any issues. they just don't clean up that well, which gives the possibility to have them perform a bit slower over time.

but trim is a nice to have, not something needed. and if one day the update will come, and your ssd can handle it, all you need is a single retrim (which hopefully the update does by itself, now that would be smart), and it's fully active and working.

so don't bother about trim, don't think about it. when you see somewhere "trim now supported", just think of it as "uh, nice, finally", and be done with it.



other than that, yes, they're night and day, and help when there are vibrations. they're awesome imho. for me, the biggest performance gain investment (and thus the cheapest one even while the prices where MUCH HIGHER when i bought them) that ever existed in computing history. and the added gains of having your laptop capable of dropping down the stage, and not losing data because of it (the laptop could get irreversible damaged, but the disk most likely will still survive, and there's the important stuff, on the disk), that is AWESOME.

and the thing is silent. no seek-noise anymore. no spin up, nothing. my workstation is passive cooled with an ssd, all i hear is music, no pc, ever.


so my main suggestion: don't overthink it. find one of good quality (i suggest intel gen2 ssds, exist right now in 80gb and 160gb variants, they're very trustable) with enough spare space (ableton cache can grow quite a bit hehe..), and install. done.

[bagginz]

the stage was right next to some huge slamming sub cabinets, and the whole stage was vibrating, I kept getting read/write errors which kept throwing synch out of line, and the whole thing crashed twice. It was my biggest nightmare. Ended up being able to finish the set by sitting my mac on a pillow (no joke).

Yep.

Skips during file playback due to vibrating DJ tables are pretty common in my DJing experience. Both from my laptop and other DJ's/performers

First thing I do when I go onstage to set up is check the table's rigidity. Second I jump up and down, landing hard a few times to check the tables isolation from the stage itself.

Good tip - take an isolation foam pad like the ones you get for studio monitors to gigs with you,.

Good tip indeed.

personally I carry 1" x 1" x 12" strips of foam to decouple my laptop from the DJ table.

I've been eyeing SSD drives for a while now.

They look to be a real boon for musicians that use laptops in live performance situations. I'll wait just a little more for the price to drop.

Cheers,
bagginz

[Threv65]

OK I can't speak to issues regarding Macbooks and TRIM/SSd support, but at my work I tested an HP 6930 on Win7 (built in SSD support)with the Intel 80GB Drive. Quite frankly if used as the Boot/Application Drive AND you load your sets from that drive (and not an Secondary) theres in no meaningful comparison. Its tortoise and the hare except inthis story the hare always wins. You can't argue with 20 second boot times and Live sets leap on to the screen. (At this point it seems to be all about how fast your CPU is because the bottleneck is no longer the Drive speed). I had to turn the machine back in to HP and that was a sad day but it sold me on SSDs (the Intel is the Gold Standard but OCZ, Kingston, Patriot and others are good.) However be wary of older SSD's "On sale" many of these use the J-micron Controller which seriously sucks Donkey balls. Also some of the older Patriots require a firmware update for TRIM. The Prices are coming down with 120 GB intel @ 425.00 But if you can manage your sets well you could save money and get an 80GB for less.

[sdmiddleton]

As far as I'm understanding - If you're running a live set..When Ableton opens up a project and it can take a while to load all samples for the given project etc, is that all being loaded to the RAM??

And also for using Live synths, is the Disk speed gonna be the issue or is the processor and Ram more of an importance...

I guess I know 'more of everything' is better, but I'm not sure which process is happening at each point of Live's Operation? The massive price leaps from the 5400 drives to a 7200/SSD seems so significant but without knowing exactly where Live gaining from all this and what that means to me, makes it quite a massive amount of money to spend on a leap of faith...

Cheers in advance!

[Machinesworking]

@sdmiddleton
All I know is the only times Live seems to stutter is reading from the disk occasionally, little disc read bursts that sometimes, not always, cause a 1/4 second audio drop out.
This is with a 7200rpm laptop drive. So I'm seriously thinking about SSD in terms of getting Live to behave. A consistent issue I get is a minor glitch when Using a huge sampled piano I have, it's not any sort of mystery that it's mainly due to the drive reading multiple sectors at the same time and getting bogged down.
These aren't major issues, but it's a little annoying to the drummer, and my anal retentive singer gets rattled by it sometimes. IMO well worth spending the $300 on a good SSD.

[Threv65]

@smiddleton, While you are correct to some extent about loading samples into RAM it goes beyond that, its goes to the heart of modern operating system performance.Given the lack of physical RAM to Disk space (relatively speaking) modern computers have used something called "virtual memory". This is where the operating systems get to take some space on the Hard disk and "pretends" that is is RAM memory.
(Below is Highly abstracted to illustrate the issue, as not everyone is a Computer anyalyst and this is asubject that is SOOO easy to geek out on )

The operating system then figures out what you are doing (memory wise) and whatever you are doing at the moment it allocates more "Real" RAM too and whatever you aren't actively working on it pushes off to slower "Virtual memory" in a process called Paging, Then when you need that application or service, it pulls it from the disk and into RAM. Its is during this transition that program slowdowns, pauses or Audio stuttering can occur. Add to this the creation of "Temporary" work files and caching that Ableton (or any other music software) and you have a hard disk that is working quite hard to (even @ 7200 or 10,000 RPM)to give you a smooth experience.

Traditionally you solved this by throwing RAM at the problem. Perhaps even going further by creating Swap file partitions(to prevent the Swap file from being fragmented decreasing the amount of movement the R/W heads have to do), putting the Swapfile on a dedicated separate physical drive. Or even altering Cluster sizes when you partioned /formatted the Drive so you have more effecient use of space. (to prevent the Swap file from being fragmented decreasing the amount of movement the R/W heads have to do.) Microsoft even added "Ready Boost" to Vista and Win7 so you can use SD or Compact flash cards for Caching operations since they can have good read speeds. (Ahem..I once experimented w a Disk array using USB sticks and USB hub)

Well now you can just spend a ton of money and get a solid state drive and forget about all that nonsense. No moving parts, incredible transer rates, no worries about vibration, no partitioning hassles, disk fragmentation is a relative non issue. Now to be sure SSD's comes with their own pecadillos but for our purposes price is the biggest obstacle.

Should you get one? Thats up to your wallet really. Do you need one? Probably not. Will you immediately benefit/ notice a diffrence if you buy a good one? Most likely. Its one of those things thats once you actually try it the difference is quite obvious (Night/Day on Windows systems I can't speak for MACs but I'm sure is comparable). The good news is that if you can wait 3-6 months, you'll undoubtedly save money as the prices will drop on the 120's (as the 200+GB come out). But if you have an extra 3-400, (tax refunds, bonus, robbing a 7-11 what-eva), the SSD is not a bad investment.

[Fledz]

You can put an SSD into a mac fine yea, and it will operate...

Taken from wikipedia, cause it can explain it better than I can....

In computing, a TRIM command allows an operating system to inform a solid-state drive (or "SSD") which data blocks, such as those belonging to a deleted file, are no longer considered in use.

Since an operating system command such as delete generally only means the data blocks are flagged in its file system as "not in use" (and thus available for new writes), the operation does not involve a physical write to the sectors that contain the data. While this often enables undelete tools to recover files from traditional hard disks, despite them being reported as "deleted" by the operating system, bypassing the storage medium also means that it remains unaware that the status of these sectors was changed. Because low-level operation of solid-state drives differs significantly from traditional hard disks (see details below), this approach resulted in unanticipated performance degradation of write operations on SSDs. In response to this, the TRIM command was introduced to allow the OS to explicitly pass the information on to the SSD controller, enabling the SSD to handle overhead that would otherwise impact future write operations on the involved blocks. [1]

Without TRIM support the write times get exponentially slower, ultimately resulting in a HD slower than 7200rpm, and further.
Currently OS X does not support TRIM, so buying a Mac with an SSD, or upgrading the HD to SSD with intention of acheiving faster read.write speeds, will ultimately be shorted lived.

This is really interesting stuff, cheers for that. Wasn't aware of it.

I've been thinking about sticking my OS on an SSD when I get my desktop sometime this year, so wondering if it's worth it. Will be using Win7 though so shouldn't have any issues as mentioned above.

[davepermen]

Without TRIM support the write times get exponentially slower, ultimately resulting in a HD slower than 7200rpm, and further.
Currently OS X does not support TRIM, so buying a Mac with an SSD, or upgrading the HD to SSD with intention of achieving faster read.write speeds, will ultimately be shorted lived.

actually not true. it's still faster by a big margin. lack of trim is overrated in a lot of cases. i have trimless ssds now since 1.5 years. in one case, i made a backup, cleared it, and restored it to test if it gains back performance. it gained back a bit.

but all in all ssds work perfectly well without trim. and the day trim is there and available, it cleans all the bits of garbage left over.

nothing short lived about them at all.

[icedsushi]

The SSD really makes a big difference, but remember that when you have your library on an external drive the whole experience wont be faster than that external one.

I think what you're trying to say here is that having your library on the internal SSD won't offer any better performance than having it on an external drive?

But would an SSD still benefit from streaming all your audio files from an external drive, or (assuming capacity is large enough) could the single internal SSD offer similar performance to an ATA w/external HD. I'm wondering if a large capacity internal SSD might eliminate the need to use an external HD to have best performance...