Anyone using a macbook pro with a SSD for audio?

[jesso]

Hey peeps,
I'm upgrading soon...
Just wondering if the SSD drive that comes as an option on the macbookpros is worth considering over a 7200 bog standard drive?
Mainly for DJing, but also music production ableton only.
Cheers.

[#1thelark]

For the price apple charges you... it's not worth it.
But if you want to add it yourself it should be a good decision. Especially the Intel postville SSDs should be working nice.

[davepermen]

the ssd option they give is subpar to other cheaper alternatives. so i'd suggest to get another ssd instead. my personal choice are intel ssds, they're amazing.

[hoffman2k]

Do SSD drives work with SATA connectors? (or whatever is in use in the MBP)
Has anybody switched out the internal HDD and optical drive with 2 SSD drives, if so: How is battery life affected?

[davepermen]

ssds are identical to hdds in form factor, so you can get them with all sort of hdd connectors. the major ones are 2.5" sata ssds, as the most notebook hdds are that form, too. for macbooks, too (except the air).

i normally buy a laptop, and directly swap out the disk with an ssd, so i can't really state the differences

[jesso]

Is there any problem streaming a lot of tracks at the same time?
Also, sometimes when I'm importing mp3s on the fly during a set, I get clicks etc.... which is shit. Would an SSD help do you think peeps?
My current macbook has a 160 gig drive (which is plenty... I never use more than 100 gigs) and 2 gigs of Ram.

[posssu]

Yes, I'm really interested in this too. How is an SSD performance when streaming many simultaneous audio tracks or in worst case 10-20 sampled instruments at the same time? Does it easily overperform 7200rpm drives with this kinds of tasks?

[jesso]

Any one else?

[William]

I'm waiting anxiously for SSD drives to become affordable. I dj for a living and would love to have a SSD drive to eliminate one more thing that could potentially fail in the middle of a gig. I need at least a 200 GB drive though.

[MartinOM28V]

Just not sure if 80GB is enough and can't afford to buy the larger ones yet. Hopefully the prices will continue to fall.

[3phase]

I'm waiting anxiously for SSD drives to become affordable. I dj for a living and would love to have a SSD drive to eliminate one more thing that could potentially fail in the middle of a gig. I need at least a 200 GB drive though.

just from experiance.. i had many things failing in the last years in stage work form usb cables.. laptop power supply.. daw crashes... syncinterfaces.. the good ol 303 itself... a pro one... the analog mixing desk...

but never a hardisk issue.. even on a 8 years old drive no issues...

theese 2,5 inch harddrives seem to be better than theier bigger brothers.. pretty reliable..

So i wouldnt be too woried about that, but have an extra set of cables with me all the time


and by the way... an standard big szise hardisk allows you to have 2 bootable partions... so when one partion fails you still can boot from the other... or an external minidrive with a bootable partion and your data backup...

[pr0jekt2501]

I replaced the hd in my macboook pro 13" with a 120gb ocz vertex ssd and have had no issues with it. Performance is very impressive and it handles playback of multi-tracks with no problems whatsoever.

[davepermen]

just from experiance.. i had many things failing in the last years in stage work form usb cables.. laptop power supply.. daw crashes... syncinterfaces.. the good ol 303 itself... a pro one... the analog mixing desk...but never a hardisk issue.. even on a 8 years old drive no issues...
theese 2,5 inch harddrives seem to be better than theier bigger brothers.. pretty reliable..

glad you had luck so far. from statistics, hdds are the most common part of a computer to die, especially from a mobile one. seen and had to replace tons of hdds so far. and the problem? anything else that fails can be replaced, but a hdd has data that you might have lost.
then again, we all know we should have backups which is why i have to try to resque data time and time again for some clients, yes..

So i wouldnt be too woried about that, but have an extra set of cables with me all the time

i suggest both

and by the way... an standard big szise hardisk allows you to have 2 bootable partions... so when one partion fails you still can boot from the other... or an external minidrive with a bootable partion and your data backup...

so can an ssd, it's just another hdd for your machine. except it's way faster (really WAAAYYY faster), and takes away any chance of physical shaking to ever kill it (be it the 120db+ from prodigy on stage, or a dropped laptop, or what ever).

have i said WAYYYY faster yet?

some simple cases:

an old xp machine, takes 20min to start up all sort of apps. with a (crap) ssd: <2min.
a firefox config that took 1min to start (filled with addons). with a (now outdated) ssd: about 1-2 secs.

installing some crazy adobe suite took around 1-2 hours on some machine. 10min with the ssd in.

for disk intensive situations where quick response is needed (like live, triggering a clip should not create a stutter, but having to wait 8ms to just get to the clip can create one, having 0.065ms to get to it, most likely, won't). so it's a definite performance and stability increase if you have tons of clips playing, and otherwise had stutterings when you played too much stuff.

[halley]

davepermen it's right.
3phase you're one lucky guy.

I've had a lot of hdd failures over the years, believe me it's only a matter of time.
I'll never forget two hardware failures:
- vjing the video memory died (laptop where too expensive... used to carry my desktop machine... night ruined!)
- djing the disk died (luckily I wasn't using the laptop alone, like I do now btw, so I just went on with the cdjs)
If you can, try to avoid the pain.
I usually try to use disks 'wisely', just a couple of considerations:
- avoid swapping (buy/keep/use a lot of ram), this doesn't necessarily always helps 'live'
if you don't keep explicitly clips in ram but if you use other applications, a lot of them
work way better with a lot of ram (photoshop, 3d apps, etc) and your disks will live longer.
- convert every mp3 to wav. pre analyze everything and keep wav files along with analysis files.

about the ssd drives that come as an option with macbookpros...
not only, as '#1thelark' already wrote, apple charges you unbelievable prices
but also, according to some articles/benchmarks, the mounted ssds are not the best out there.
for now, your better options are intel and some, but not all, the OCZ.

Whatever you choose you'd better read carefully all the possible technical issues.
Have a look at pcper.com (some of the firmware and trim related stuff done by intel
started from tests made on this website).
Good reviews are normally also on anandtech.com and arstechnica.com, but there are plenty...

Whatever you choose SSD are way more safer and faster then normal HDD,
why are the most widely disks used in military grade computers?

I used to carry an external G-tech raid.
If one of the raid disks dies, I won't lose the data,
but still I can't use it live until I've replaced the broken drive, rebuilt the raid...
So I used to carry with me also other disks (not raid), just to have a backup,
but performance it's not the same.
With the raid I've never had a click or dropout, with normal disks it could happen,
and it surely happens if you use many tracks.

I've changed the internal disk of an old vaio laptop, couldn't believe it when I started it,
it seems almost new. Now I don't bring other disks, I just bring the extra/spare laptop.
I can't have all my music library on it because the SSD is not big as the other disks,
and I've to be a bit more careful with CPU load, but redundancy increases safety.


I'll wonder what SSD options will be available on future macs...

[davepermen]

I'll wonder what SSD options will be available on future macs...

most likely intel. the g2 intels have specifically noted to fit into the "green specs" of apple. this is a definite "intel doesn't like that they used samsung ssds" hint

oh, and, the intel ssd btw behave like a raid0 of 10 disks in terms of chance of dropouts (and each disk having much lower latency). in short: you won't have audio dropouts on an intel ssd.