Ableton Forum

Anyone have a Solid State Drive? Does it make a big difference for music production?

Live will start quicker...

cids wrote:Live will start quicker...

Is that it? Probably not really worth an extra £100!

I believe they are quieter. That's a big positive in my book. They are less fragile = better for laptops & performance.

Yes, huge benefit, with a laptop, you can work with only 1 HD, the mechanical 2,5" drive reads between 30 / 60 mo/sec, less in write.. Now an OCZ Vertex 2 reads and writes up to 275 / 285 mo/sec.
It's solid and really reactive.. Excellent for music production

Best,

raw wrote:Yes, huge benefit, with a laptop, you can work with only 1 HD, the mechanical 2,5" drive reads between 30 / 60 mo/sec, less in write.. Now an OCZ Vertex 2 reads and writes up to 275 / 285 mo/sec.
It's solid and really reactive.. Excellent for music production

Best,

You say it's good for a laptop. I am considering a desktop system. Do you think it's worth it then?

No more glitches because of shaky tables. Great for playing live.

futuremoves wrote:

raw wrote:Yes, huge benefit, with a laptop, you can work with only 1 HD, the mechanical 2,5" drive reads between 30 / 60 mo/sec, less in write.. Now an OCZ Vertex 2 reads and writes up to 275 / 285 mo/sec.
It's solid and really reactive.. Excellent for music production

Best,

You say it's good for a laptop. I am considering a desktop system. Do you think it's worth it then?

I also have a SSD in my desktop, of course it's great too ! A good SSD (like Vertex 2) for the system and a second big mechanical HD, perfect! (But I think it's essential in a laptop.. )

Well I have an ssd but when opening a large set it doesnt seem to open any faster then with my former 7200rpm drive. Anyone feels the same about this ?

Still I recommend ssd's. Startup ofcourse is way faster. Programs feel snappier and everything runs more stable. And I do not have to put large wav files in ram, the ssd is fast enough to read them from disk.

M-bition wrote:Well I have an ssd but when opening a large set it doesnt seem to open any faster then with my former 7200rpm drive. Anyone feels the same about this ?

I was about to buy SSD for this reason

I put a Vertex 3 in my macbook pro, it runs at 500mb a second read and write. it's a heck of a lot faster at loading large live sets than the old drive. My live set took a few minutes to load on the old drive, on the SSD it loads in just over 30 seconds. Just make sure that any sound banks and samples it needs to load are also on the SSD or you'll end up wiating for them to load from the mechanical drive, and won't really see the benefit.

I got a bracket from here: http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index ... uct_ID=186

So I have my OS and programs and live sets (collected and saved) on the SSD, then all my other stuff on the second drive in the optical drive tray.

For approx $365 for the drive and bracket and external housing for the optical drive, it was totally worth it.

From what I've read it won't make a difference in processing more tracks etc, but personally to be able to boot into my computer in around 30secs is enough for me. All of my apps feel snappier (placebo) or at least they load a bit faster on startup.


Have a Vertex 2 in my MacPro but won't put one in my laptop until my Apple warranty runs out (2 years) then I'll put in an SSD for boot and maybe remove the Superdrive and put a larger capacity one in there:

http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/

I got a Vertex3 in my Mac Pro. Boot time is sometimes faster for Live... however, CPU is the bottleneck for opening big projects. When I'm loading projects, I can see 1 core peaking at 100% and the hard drive doing nothing. All the other cores are sitting there idle.

So I reckon that while Live is loading up all the VST's/AU's etc, that is a single threaded affair so you are limited by how fast 1 of your cores is.

So an SSD will make a difference, but possibly not as much as you'd think as far as production goes.

I might be wrong but a ssd should be better at handling sets with lots of audio files playing at the same time.
There should be less disk overload since no spinning around looking for a specific sector since it can randomly access all section at any time with the same speed.. just my 2 cents

timothyallan wrote: So I reckon that while Live is loading up all the VST's/AU's etc, that is a single threaded affair so you are limited by how fast 1 of your cores is.

I feel that way to. I also have the feeling that loading all these vst's/fx/routings/tracks depends a lot on the speed of your cpu. Loading the audio files at the end is faster indeed (you can see them loading at the bottom of your screen).

I have to add that my laptop's chipset doesn't work very well with ssd's, it has problems getting the most performance out of them (chipset pm45)