Solid state hard drives?

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omutumo
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Solid state hard drives?

Post by omutumo » Tue May 03, 2011 11:08 am

Anybody know if these are due to drop in price any time soon? Badly want to get one but it seems that manufacturers haven't really bothered focusing on them much. I thought the old mechanical drives would have died a death shortly after USB pen-drives became all the rage, but here we are a few years down the line and it's still about £400 for a good size SS HD.

Any recommendations from those who already have one? The internet tells me OCZ make the best at the moment...

loydb
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Re: Solid state hard drives?

Post by loydb » Tue May 03, 2011 2:55 pm

They've dropped slightly, you can now find them for less than $2/gig. I think we're another 18-24 months away from it getting down to $1/gig or so.
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H20nly
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Re: Solid state hard drives?

Post by H20nly » Wed May 04, 2011 10:52 pm

don't forget... they have a finite number of writes.

they might work well for storage, but you start moving audio samples around and deleting temps etc... you may find you burn through that number sooner than you'd like.

pulsoc
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Re: Solid state hard drives?

Post by pulsoc » Thu May 05, 2011 2:36 am

I really don't think the "write endurance" thing is an issue unless you are doing server intensity work.

H20nly
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Re: Solid state hard drives?

Post by H20nly » Thu May 05, 2011 4:32 pm

pulsoc wrote:I really don't think the "write endurance" thing is an issue unless you are doing server intensity work.
the write endurance thing will be an issue if you're frequently writing to the drive. SSDs are better for reading than for writing. they're superior in pretty much every other way, speed, footprint, power consumption, but this one flaw keeps them from being installed in everyfukinthing. you can recover a hard drive. once an SSD decides times up... it just is. i wouldn't store all my tracks on a USB drive either. YRMV.

davepermen
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Re: Solid state hard drives?

Post by davepermen » Thu May 05, 2011 5:10 pm

they drop in price all the time. every year they're less expensive than the year before. it's a steady going-down.

and the amount of writes you'd have to do to kill one is, in ordinary usage, enough to have it functional for AT LEAST 10 years. till then, you sure got a new one anyways (if, by then, any form of pc/notebook is still in existance). so no, it technically can't ever be an issue, not even for heavy users (heavy users have at least 10 years. non-heavy users up to 80 years). these numbers are estimates based on tens of years of knowledge on how many writes a flash cell survives. they're not random babbling. unlike the myth that an ssd dies from too much writing (yes it does. but way beyond the amount of writing being in any form of importance).

i have ssd now since 2.5 years in all of my systems (i have >10 ssds), and they changed the way i experience computers. no fear of any damage when dropping my laptop, absolute silence in the studio (except for the noise i want of course). much faster and more responsive systems.

do they cost much? yes. too much? no. definitely worth their money. nothing else you could buy would give you an as big improvement of your system. not even buying a new one.

so no, forget about write endurance. get one, enjoy it, and laught about all those who say it's too expensive, or 'it could die'. hdds can die, too. they do it randomly. a good ssd doesn't die randomly. it reports you it's remaining lifetime, and thus you're rather safe. at least, much more save than with a hdd while being on stage.
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Re: Solid state hard drives?

Post by davepermen » Thu May 05, 2011 5:11 pm

H20nly wrote:
pulsoc wrote:I really don't think the "write endurance" thing is an issue unless you are doing server intensity work.
the write endurance thing will be an issue if you're frequently writing to the drive. SSDs are better for reading than for writing. they're superior in pretty much every other way, speed, footprint, power consumption, but this one flaw keeps them from being installed in everyfukinthing. you can recover a hard drive. once an SSD decides times up... it just is. i wouldn't store all my tracks on a USB drive either. YRMV.
backup? yes. solved. get backup working. realtime backup at best. daily one is good enough, though, for most. because, never forget: ANYTHING can fail. and believe me, recovering from a crashed hdd (a really crashed one) is very expensive, as it is nearly impossible. backup, the only way to not just feel save, but be save.
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H20nly
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Re: Solid state hard drives?

Post by H20nly » Thu May 05, 2011 5:19 pm

+1 for backups. no doubt.

i still think that as (computer based) musicians... we'd put a lot of load on an SSD. much more so than a typical user. at least, i would. i record audio tracks... vocals, bass, guitar. it's nothing for me to write to a drive 100 times in a session. then there's everything else that people do with their computers too.

beats me
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Re: Solid state hard drives?

Post by beats me » Thu May 05, 2011 5:54 pm

Just based on the size restrictions alone it’s not worth it for anybody that does audio or video work. I have a Macbook Air with a 256G SSD and just between my music library, Logic, and Komplete I’m pretty much done as far as space, allowing for space to store future music projects on and I’m probably already passed the recommended drive free space to keep the computer from choking.

So I’m completely baffled by anybody who wants to pay a premium to slap a 128G SSD drive in their laptop thinking they can just work within that limitation. Space will become way more of an issue than the benefit you get from a zippy drive.

hacktheplanet
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Re: Solid state hard drives?

Post by hacktheplanet » Thu May 05, 2011 5:57 pm

H20nly wrote:+1 for backups. no doubt.

i still think that as (computer based) musicians... we'd put a lot of load on an SSD. much more so than a typical user. at least, i would. i record audio tracks... vocals, bass, guitar. it's nothing for me to write to a drive 100 times in a session. then there's everything else that people do with their computers too.
Meh. It would take you like 5 years of constantly writing data to the SSD to even approach the limit. By then it would be very cheap to replace the drive. Modern SSDs have good load-balancing stuff built into their controllers. Plus, regular mechanical hard drives seem to fail in about 5 years anyway because of mechanical wear.
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H20nly
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Re: Solid state hard drives?

Post by H20nly » Thu May 05, 2011 6:01 pm

the_planet wrote:
H20nly wrote:+1 for backups. no doubt.

i still think that as (computer based) musicians... we'd put a lot of load on an SSD. much more so than a typical user. at least, i would. i record audio tracks... vocals, bass, guitar. it's nothing for me to write to a drive 100 times in a session. then there's everything else that people do with their computers too.
Meh. It would take you like 5 years of constantly writing data to the SSD to even approach the limit. By then it would be very cheap to replace the drive. Modern SSDs have good load-balancing stuff built into their controllers.
i get where you're coming from i do, but roll with me on this one...

i've seen programs that write a log file go to town and fill up an entire 100+ gig hard drive. let's say you leave your kit on... walk away... and stay gone for a few days. you come back to find that there are 400,000 files/entries (each requiring a single write) saying "no error detected" or "backup complete" or some such. :idea:
Last edited by H20nly on Thu May 05, 2011 6:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

pulsoc
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Re: Solid state hard drives?

Post by pulsoc » Thu May 05, 2011 6:06 pm

the_planet wrote:
H20nly wrote:Meh. It would take you like 5 years of constantly writing data to the SSD to even approach the limit. By then it would be very cheap to replace the drive. Modern SSDs have good load-balancing stuff built into their controllers. Plus, regular mechanical hard drives seem to fail in about 5 years anyway because of mechanical wear.
This. The rewrite endurance issue is one of those weird unkillable memes that really has no relevance to a user. If you are the kind of person who is going to write ONE MILLION times to EACH CELL then you may have a problem. An SLC SSD being re-written at maximum speed won't hit it's rewrite limit for about 30 years.

hacktheplanet
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Re: Solid state hard drives?

Post by hacktheplanet » Thu May 05, 2011 6:06 pm

H20nly wrote:
the_planet wrote: Meh. It would take you like 5 years of constantly writing data to the SSD to even approach the limit. By then it would be very cheap to replace the drive. Modern SSDs have good load-balancing stuff built into their controllers.
i get where you're coming from i do, but roll with me on this one...

i've seen programs that write a log file go to town and fill up an entire 100+ gig hard drive. let's say you leave your kit on... walk away... and stay gone for a few days. you come back to find that there are 400,000 entries (each requiring a single write) saying "no error detected" or "backup complete" or some such. :idea:
Totally. The solution here is to disable those options. There are also ways to limit filesizes. :D I know Win 7 can detect when it is being installed on an SSD and make necessary adjustments to minimize disk writes (disable automatic defrag). I do agree with you that SSDs are still pretty "underground" right now, and it might take a while for software companies to catch up and make sure that their products don't overextend stuff like SSDs.

And yes, backing stuff up is the smart thing to do 100% of the time. The biggest problem with SSDs right now is their cost. Heh heh.
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H20nly
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Re: Solid state hard drives?

Post by H20nly » Thu May 05, 2011 6:11 pm

the_planet wrote:I do agree with you that SSDs are still pretty "underground" right now, and it might take a while for software companies to catch up and make sure that their products don't overextend stuff like SSDs.
^ the scary part is... to some extent, the companies could want this.

i mean if iPods only lasted the typical user 4 years this would sell more iPods than if they lasted 10 right? whats a good way to limit the life expectancy of a device that focuses on file transfers?

pulsoc
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Re: Solid state hard drives?

Post by pulsoc » Thu May 05, 2011 6:15 pm

H20nly wrote:
the_planet wrote:I do agree with you that SSDs are still pretty "underground" right now, and it might take a while for software companies to catch up and make sure that their products don't overextend stuff like SSDs.
^ the scary part is... to some extent, the companies could want this.

i mean if iPods only lasted the typical user 4 years this would sell more iPods than if they lasted 10 right? whats a good way to limit the life expectancy of a device that focuses on file transfers?
iPhone, iPod Touch, iPod Nano - ssd.

Jesus come on man

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