Ableton Forum

Does anyone know if having your Projects saved to a SSD decreases the time it takes for Live to freeze a MIDI track with a plugin like Massive on it? I am very interested in getting one and this fact alone would have me sold. How is sample loading, etc? Thanks!

Pretty sure it won't. Bouncing/rendering/freezing time is basically dependent on your cpu, not your ram or hard drive. Your samples will load/save faster, but freezing time won't be any different unfortunately. Once the file is frozen, it'll be written to your drive faster, but the actual process of freezing will take the same amount of time. Sorry!

seems logical.

It doesn't matter

Personally I wouldn't waste the 100,000 writes or whatever lifespan SSDs have on saving my ableton projects or freezing stuff quicker. You may get faster access to read/write but if you're writing lots of files to a device which only supports so many writes in its lifespan - you're greatly sacrificing how long you drive will last.

And when they die.. they DIE.. they are nothing like a platter based hard drive which has a few options for recovering data after a crash/hardware failure. If your SSD dies, your data just went *poof*.

IMO the only really good use for SSDs right now is for booting your OS and installing/running apps off of. I move all my temp files, and caches, etc.. to a second drive so there's not excessive writing going on, and confident it will last me a while.

Nothing to see here.

Nicknackerski wrote:Really???

The one i have has this Life time spec:
72TB=40GB per day for 5 years!
(Crucial m4 256gb)

If losing a drive is so important you could always buy two Raid 1 the drives and each drive mirrors the other meaning faster access than one but also reduces the risk of losing both drives.

Yeah, it's not as bad as when I bought my SSD last year I guess. The first one I bought died after a month, and I found out nothing was recoverable. Didn't even want to install things to my 2nd one, but it's been running solid since with just my OS/apps and all caches/temp files moved to a separate drive.

I suppose if you want to spend the money getting a SSD with specs suggesting years of use and run it like it's going out of style that's fine. I just don't trust the technology to bother with a RAID setup.. easier and cheaper to backup on a raided pair of 7200rpm drives.

if you think about it, RAID doesn't make the best parachute in this situation. if the problem is that the drive(s) will only allow so many writes and you're writing across both drives... then they will go out around roughly the same time.

You can always dropbox all your ableton stuff as backup. That's what I do, init.

So there doesn't seem to be a solid consensus about whether or not freezing will be significantly faster. Who knows for sure???

Move it along please.

Don't mind me. Carry on

Nicknackerski wrote:

ionic wrote:So there doesn't seem to be a solid consensus about whether or not freezing will be significantly faster. Who knows for sure???

Books are awesome. i'm currently reading 1-2 a week
try this Book

cotdagoo wrote:
I suppose if you want to spend the money getting a SSD with specs suggesting years of use and run it like it's going out of style that's fine. I just don't trust the technology to bother with a RAID setup.. easier and cheaper to backup on a raided pair of 7200rpm drives.

Thats bad. What manufacturer did you use for info. Was it crucial?
I usually copy my projects to another drive (even before i had the SSD) that way the os/Apps run off the SSD with back up to another drive.

and whereabouts in this book did you find anything relating to the freezing time of audio as it relates to SSD?

It depends on which factor is now bottleneck of the speed. If you don't have fast CPU and the bottle neck is CPU, SSD won't help you speed up freezing. If you have fast CPU and it process data faster than the speed of HDD writing the wav data into it the SSD will contribute to the freezing speed.