How awesome are SSD drives?

[sporkles]

To those of you sporting an SSD drive (and especially in a laptop): do you only use it for the OS and applications?
If so, do you keep all your files and projects on an external drive? How is that working out - any performance
drop, compared to an internal drive? (I've only tried that with my music library, for use with Traktor and
Ayetunes, which is no problem).

[ARDJ]

are we talking temperature or penis size, i'm confused...

[sporkles]

Thanks for the bump. The question still stands.

[Mister Natural]

To those of you sporting an SSD drive (and especially in a laptop): do you only use it for the OS and applications?
If so, do you keep all your files and projects on an external drive? How is that working out - any performance
dtop, compared to an internal drive? (I've only tried that with my music library, for use with Traktor and
Ayetunes, which is no problem).

use a ssd 74gb for my apps & os on my studio desktop

- never going back : fast, dead quiet, reliable

[sporkles]

^ Thanks for the feedback! How about laptop users? Anyone?

[Delie]

I own an intel ssd. I use it for my o/s boot drive and only the programs I use the most. It's nice, fast and quiet, but it wont change your life and they're probably not worth the cost. Whilst the boot time is noticeably quicker, it's not massively obvious for most programs. They're a blatant rip off at the moment unfortunately, but they are the future.

[pepezabala]

Now is there or isn't there an advantage in using usb-pendrives for your liveset? I have now a 8 GB pendrive. Is it supposedly faster than my internal 5400 rpm harddrive?

How would I measure that?

[Simbosan]

I would use it for your page file, Ableton Library and Ableton sets. If you use it for OS you will mostly speed up boot and not much else. Use it for data that is read and written a LOT. OS files tend to be load once and stay resident, except when paged which is why you should stick your page file on the SSD.

S

[MPGK]

This is like the fourth thread about SSDs this month. Must be getting popular. I'll wait until they're affordable.

[Khazul]

If your just going to use it for a pagge file, then surely just get more main memory for your machine? Cheaper and far more efffective!

Actually I was wonderign about the real world performance of these things as well for a 2.66Ghz/8GB i7 macbook pro - 500Gb 5400 rpm drive, or the apple 128GB ssd + external drive?

[Piplodocus]

Actually I was wonderign about the real world performance of these things as well for a 2.66Ghz/8GB i7 macbook pro - 500Gb 5400 rpm drive, or the apple 128GB ssd + external drive?

I'd get one with a Sandforce chipset (check OCZ or OWC?), rather than an overpriced slower Apple one.

There's some figures on http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal ... _Sandforce

Dunno about real-world DAW use though. I guess real world is easier with SSDs since they'll always read nearer their peak output than a physical platter will.

It's probably worth checking write speeds as well though if you're recording.

[Simbosan]

If your just going to use it for a pagge file, then surely just get more main memory for your machine? Cheaper and far more efffective!

RAM is limited by CPU addressing e.g. 4gb for 32bit processor, paging isn't. Paging is a fact of life, paging always happens. And no I wouldn't use it 'just' for paging. I ain't that rich yet =) Tho it would be nice!

S

[ARDJ]

Thanks for the bump. The question still stands.

haha you changed it from "how cool are SSD drives" to now, "how awesome". trying to make me look dumb but i'm on to you!

[sporkles]

haha you changed it from "how cool are SSD drives" to now, "how awesome".

Correct

trying to make me look dumb

Incorrect (and it's not like you needed any help, penis guy). I realised the ambiguity of the first title, so I changed it.

[Khazul]

If your just going to use it for a pagge file, then surely just get more main memory for your machine? Cheaper and far more efffective!

RAM is limited by CPU addressing e.g. 4gb for 32bit processor, paging isn't. Paging is a fact of life, paging always happens. And no I wouldn't use it 'just' for paging. I ain't that rich yet =) Tho it would be nice!

S

Well - true if you are running a ton of other shit, but memory management in a DAW doesnt really use the page file much in the way an ordinary application does - as it mostly uses locked virtual memory - ie the assigned phsyical pages are locked in memory and not paged out by the OS, but instead tend to be micro-managed by the app or plugin to do audio/sample buffering.

Of course anything running else that is non-real time will use page file space upto the application memory limit, so yes it helps a little.