lets talk SSD hard drives

trevox · Post by **trevox** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 12:50 pm

I have my OS/Applications on a SSD and similar to others here, it makes a massive difference. Not necessarily to raw performance, but you spend little or no time waiting for your machine to catch up with what you're doing. My MBP boots in less than 15 seconds. Opening any application is ridiculously fast (no bouncing ball). No system crashes etc etc...

To overcome lack of storage, I replaced the optical drive with a 500Gb 7200RPM drive - well worth doing too to avoid the need for an external drive and get SATA speeds for accessing your samples libraries etc.

JuanSOLO · Post by **JuanSOLO** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 7:43 pm

I've been wanting to replace the optical with a HD and get an SSD drive as well. I know very little about SSD's and how they work in conjunction with Ableton.

I know my apps will launch faster. What I dont know is, should I get a large enough SSD to keep my samples, or Live Library on? If my main Live set is centered around my DrumRack which uses lots of samples will Live perform better? How much better?

markhunter · Post by **markhunter** » Wed Mar 07, 2012 10:28 pm

ciw wrote:And, you should always have a good backup plan, whether using HDDs or SSDs.

+1

Your personal data is the most valuable... everything else can be reinstalled from scratch. The choice is simple... is it important, can you live without it?

Personally I transcribe all my work to binary and write it out long hand

sidownes · Post by **sidownes** » Thu Mar 08, 2012 12:46 pm

Kind of a side note, but where do most people keep their Library, sets and samples? I'm pushed for space to keep my Library and sets on the internal spinning disk of my laptop, so if I switched to an SSD the space problem would be even worse. Also, I find Live to be insanely slow when performing searching which I guess would be inproved with an SSD.

trevox · Post by **trevox** » Thu Mar 08, 2012 2:00 pm

JuanSOLO wrote:I've been wanting to replace the optical with a HD and get an SSD drive as well. I know very little about SSD's and how they work in conjunction with Ableton.

I know my apps will launch faster. What I dont know is, should I get a large enough SSD to keep my samples, or Live Library on? If my main Live set is centered around my DrumRack which uses lots of samples will Live perform better? How much better?

Ideally, the OS/apps and all samples etc would be on SSD's, but it does come down to how much space your samples/library take up - i.e. do you use several huge sample banks (4 or 5 Gb's) or are your sample banks generally quite small. Another eater of space is multi-track recording as you can end up with several Gb's of audio per project. Another thing to consider is when you are running your OS/apps on an SSD, do you want your audio reading/writing to the same disk or on a separate SATA bus? This has always been something that "experts" encourage.

I did not do any comparison tests, but I can run a few instances of Kontakt accessing large drum and piano sample banks (from the second HDD) and simultaneously record multiple track of audio to the same drive without issue. So I have a good mixture of fast OS/apps and lots of storage for a relatively low cost.

ps - I have my library on the SSD, but not the samples or Live projects.

JuanSOLO · Post by **JuanSOLO** » Thu Mar 08, 2012 2:26 pm

If I get an SSD drive I would probably get an amount of space I am accustomed too, at least for Live and the creation of music. I dont use Live professionally. I use Live for performance, and a bit of recording. I have 1 Live Set that I continuously work on, if I want to record a song, or produce a track I generally work up a draft in my Live set, then save it out as a new project, tweak on it, render it out. When all is done I save/move the Project on an external HD.
I also DJ part time.

So my thinking is this.

I get an SSD drive, somewhere around 300gigs or so. I would keep my OS, apps, and sample Library on that. So Live would run snappy and more effecient. This would also allow me to record to the SSD drive, and pull audio clips from the SSD drive super fast. However, using an HD to keep projects backed up once they are complete, as well as keeping all my music and other crap on the HD.

Does that sound practical? Am I thinking about this the right way?

I generally have a set amount of samples for drums, a set amount of loops I use, and not much else. I take up a limited amount of space. HOWEVER, I do use Ms Pinky and do some destructive loop recording during a set. I am thinking the SSD drive would be great at this, and although the loop recording would take up the most space, these loops get trashed or backed up after sessions anyhow.

trevox · Post by **trevox** » Thu Mar 08, 2012 3:51 pm

Yeah, I am sure it would work fine. The only thing I would look out for is the fact that you are better not using the same bus/drive for running your OS/apps and reading/writing large amounts of audio at the same time. But if you are currently doing all of this with a standard HDD and it works, I am sure using a SSD will be a big improvement one way or another - not sure if Live's performance will improve, but you will certainly have a much snappier machine in general for sure!

With the cost of larger SSD's, I wasn't willing to buy a really large one just yet. In time, I would like to replace my second HDD with a large SSD for reading/writing audio (separate from my OS/apps one), but that can wait for the moment! One thing I will say is that you should really research which SSD you buy. The cheaper ones tend not to perform well at all in comparison to the higher end ones, so a balancing act between price and performance is a delicate one. I bought an Intel one at the time which was meant to be most reliable, but that may have changed by now. I hear OCZ Vertex 3 are pretty good in terms of price/performance - though you'll have to pay through the nose for any one over 240Gb!

JuanSOLO · Post by **JuanSOLO** » Thu Mar 08, 2012 4:01 pm

trevox wrote:The only thing I would look out for is the fact that you are better not using the same bus/drive for running your OS/apps and reading/writing large amounts of audio at the same time.

This is the kind of info I need more of. It makes me wonder if I should try something like a small 80gig SSD for OS and apps, and a larger one for sample libraries and recording audio, and use my external HD for backup.

trevox · Post by **trevox** » Thu Mar 08, 2012 4:18 pm

JuanSOLO wrote:
trevox wrote:The only thing I would look out for is the fact that you are better not using the same bus/drive for running your OS/apps and reading/writing large amounts of audio at the same time.
This is the kind of info I need more of. It makes me wonder if I should try something like a small 80gig SSD for OS and apps, and a larger one for sample libraries and recording audio, and use my external HD for backup.

For me, that is the ideal solution - just not willing to spend €600 on a large SSD, so I'm sticking with a large standard HDD as my second drive for now!

You can google search for detail on the benefits of using a separate drive for reading/writing audio for music production to see if it would make a big difference to you. Or maybe do things in instalments - get your OS/apps on a small SSD and then consider if you really need a large second SSD or if a standard one works okay. I would advise to get a slightly bigger drive if possible for OS/apps though, as I find myself a little limited with 80Gb's. In retrospect, I should have gotten a 100/120Gb one. Make sure it has TRIM support too...

JuanSOLO · Post by **JuanSOLO** » Thu Mar 08, 2012 4:40 pm

good advice, thanks!

housemusiclover · Post by **housemusiclover** » Thu Mar 08, 2012 7:35 pm

Crucial M4 128gb, LOVE it!!

ambientidm · Post by **ambientidm** » Sat Mar 10, 2012 1:06 am

my new mbp has a apple installed ssd 128 gigs
it appears to be slightly slowing down from blazing fast to just really fast
i use this with a sata drive as my audio/samples drive http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other+Wo ... DDAMBS0GB/
the superdrive is now in an external usb box

i plan on getting a crucial m4 in the future for the boot drive

pencilrocket · Post by **pencilrocket** » Sun Mar 11, 2012 3:53 pm

oops,,, my SSD have got problem. It's timely. OS reported HDD has bad sector and crashed. OS tried to recover the system but driver files are corrupeted.

I begin to unsure whether SSD can be reconmend to anyone.

Gab · Post by **Gab** » Sun Mar 11, 2012 4:02 pm

pencilrocket wrote:oops,,, my SSD have got problem. It's timely. OS reported HDD has bad sector and crashed. OS tried to recover the system but driver files are corrupeted.

I begin to unsure whether SSD can be reconmend to anyone.

The same can happen to a HDD. As said before, both can fail, and you should backup your system/valuable files whether you use one or the other. Reliability is not the discriminating factor between HDDs and SSDs (cost is), which does not mean that reliability issues cannot happen with SSDs.

What is your SSD, by the way ? Some (such as OCZ drives, especially the Agility series) are known for their reliability problems. Other (Intel & Crucial drives) are generally praised.

pencilrocket · Post by **pencilrocket** » Mon Mar 12, 2012 5:25 am

The data is not the problem this time as I didn't save documents on it and did make backup on external drive. But the installation of OS and the other program will take time. My first SSD, 4 month using, partial data died. That's why I still can't feel reliability on it.

FWIW, the manufacture is Intel.

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