Worth The Wait

[dawman]

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

The master has spoken.
This just confirms my suspicions as my only experience with an SSD was a crap shoot.
We tried it on sample streaming but since the samples were in RAM to begin with, our only way to bench was polyphony, and since Kontakt tops out at 400, and Giga about twice that amount, the results were similar to a Raptor.
Hence the need for swapping the O.S. + Apps drive with it.
If your using a well optimized streamer like Gigastudio or VE, you won't be needing an SSD, but if Kontakt, Play or Garritan's ARIA are being used the SSD's give the extra bandwifth needed. I use all of the above but at at the end of the day, Gigastudio has always streamed more efficiently and never needed an Octo Quad or any other ridiculously bad ass CPU.
Even now the libraries I have on my only 7200 rpm HDD have tons of polyphony, and as long as I only use the Pedal down IR's the CPU is hardly needed. Just like Scope, that's why I love my GigaScope DAWg's.
BTW there will be an announcement made at Messe that will make all Gigastudio users feverishly happy....

This summer will be a great time to upgrade a DAW. Overstocked shelves with new models arriving will surely decrease the prices while offering more mature products...

FWIW, I just recently upgraded Bidule as it is now MultiCore capable, thanks MD69...
The first thing I noticed was when I did my usual Grand Piano poly test with sustain for maximum effect I got no pops or clicks, and no stolen voices..
I then went to my Romplers and added the full sections, not the economy versions. and all string and horn stacks are ferociously large and handle massive poly.
I can't believe I basically took away all of the optimizations of my Streamers by having a single threaded host !!!
I now have all of the high quality features like extended Horn swells via the ModWheel, etc. mostly CPU related chores.
Once again I have escaped the need for 64bit apps.
I am fraggin' all of my drives and buying an SSD for O.S. + Apps. as soon as the prices drop this summer.
Let's hope the economy doesn't pick up until the Fall.....

[Neutron]

there is a samsung one, which is only avaliable to OEMs right now that is even better then that OCZ one.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/03/17 ... mmd0e56g5/
Soon SSD will saturate the SATA2 connection.

[dawman]

I can't wait.
I want to have the best stage rig with the smallest footprint.
My Controller and Solaris will be the largest thing onstage by summers end..............
The entire band ( trio or quartet ) will be mixed and use the IEM's again and if I get a nice house gig, I will be using 5.1, or at least be the first to fail publicly.
An old Scope user who use to dwell here just got his 2.26 Xoen OctoCore MacPro and has already told me a fast i7 w/ 8GB's of RAM is all I will ever need.
He has been authorizing apps for 2 days, but says the new on board memory controller and fast RAM is astounding for music apps.
Makes me think an i7 w/ upgradability to 64bit later is the way to go.
With DDR3 performance excelling and prices dropping, RAM and SSD w/ an i7 this summer is looking like a great possibilty......tick..................now tock...

The Samsung will fit right in between the OCZ and Intel price per GB too.

[valis]

I *completely* agree stardust.

Neutron, Samsung's current drives are already in the Macbook Air & some of Dell's stuff. They make great controllers (the only of the lot so far that don't optimize for one thing only besides Intel) and they use SLC flash chips, which is why they perform so well. The downside is the cost... I do believe of of the SLC drives was benchmarked with the others in the article.

What was interesting in the article was his extensive interactions with OCZ, and the way the company responded. Neither Intel nor Samsung will either admit to issues with a reviewer who finds a problem (Intel recently used doublespeak to 'not deny' the micro-fragmentation issue with their X25's) nor do they immediately address it (Intel: "we are unable to replicate results but will continue to look into it...")

The parallels to hard drives circa mid 90's are interesting, it took a lot of work to do things like burn a cdr at 2x or get audio & video to playback smoothly (hello AV interleaved drives). Budget conscious drives would 'hitch' and lockup the entire system bus during an access for often up to 2-3 seconds due to the controller not being designed for multitasking (hence the Apple crowd touting SCSI).

I still think that rompler/sample playback or any streaming media playback is fine with current gen SSD drives, especially with models that sacrifice random access & write times for pure playback speed. The benchmarks shown in this article and the 'real world' testing that was done supports this idea rather well. They just fall down in tasks that fall outside of what they're tuned for; ie, they're not flexible enough yet to use 1 firmware & flash technology for a wide variety of tasks.

Perhaps until the write issue is solved (instead of 'mitigated') what is really needed is custom firmwares. RAID users already get this from many vendors, though it's a bit more difficult to get them to own up to issues and issue a firmware 'fix' it is becoming more common (especially from Samsung and *cough* Seagate). If OCZ were to take a similar approach, and tune firmware for specific applications that you could apply yourself that might be well interesting. Sell the drives for a bit of a premium over the generalized consumer version (again this is essentially what half the makers are already doing for 'consumer' and 'enterprise' drive versions now) and allow the drive that runs $20 more to be easily flashed and supported when issues arise. I can see firmwares like one for 'high performance multitasking' another for 'low multitasking power saving netbook' and yet another for say 'high throughput file server or media playback' etc...another for RAID configurations where timeouts are paramount...

In any case I'd say my take is still the same as before... from where I sit it's 1.5-2 years before these things are compelling enough to use as an OS/working drive. For audio tasks...if you do a lot of RECORDING unless you're partial to periodically wiping the entire drive we'll just have to see how things pan out with the firmware tuning and evolution of the flash chips.

And for desktop users who 'gotta have it now' over at 2cpu.com there's a fellow with a few of OCZ's Vertex drives in a RAID array ( I would guess raid 0) posting decent benchmarks and no severe write or latency issues thanks to the RAID (like 800Mb/s throughput on larger data chunks). $100 per drive and $400 for the controller... so it's not an unachievable thing but consider he's using 4 30GB drives and has spent $800 for only 120GB of (albeit VERY FAST) storage.

[Crickstone]

BTW there will be an announcement made at Messe that will make all Gigastudio users feverishly happy....

Well just knowing there is an announcement of some kind makes me giddy....

[valis]

Here's a new ioDrive (Duo)

Still SLC flash based, still incredibly fast and still insanely expensive.

[dawman]

My son told me about those years ago. They were used in the Avionics packages of aircraft and logistic racks 15 years ago.
And they say consumers get trickled down server technology....
The 24 year life span cycle shows you how long it'll be before we can afford one.

OCZ was showing this one in Tapei a while back.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/05/oczs ... pcie-slot/

My only move will be to replace my O.S drive. I just see the short life span of the current state of SSD's being killed my sampler apps.
Defragging isn't necessary they say...............yeah, well living more than 2 years sure the fuck is necessary...

I do enjoy seeing the new technology and glad I didn't have to serve in a war zone to finally get a peak.

[petal]

Damn - you guys are a bunch of gearsluts!

[valis]

512GB SSD's are here!

Git yers now for only $1499.99.....

[netguyjoel]

Damn - you guys are a bunch of gearsluts!

Access Virus C rack, Waldorf Q Rack, Microwave, Pulse, Supernova II rack, JD990 rack w/ vintage synth expander, Nord Lead 2x rack, SY99, Redsounds Elevata, Ensoniq DP4, Lexicon MDX500, Roland PM16, TD20, Scope 3.1c 6 dsp card mix & master I, synth & sampler I Modular II, NI Complete 3, Behringer BCF & BCR, (2) MX9000 consoles, (4) B1800X subs, (4) B1220 mids & high, (6) EP2500 amps, (2) CX3400 stereo crossovers, (2) B1500dsp powered floor monitors, Alesis RM100 & Monitor II, 12 simmons pads, 10 ddrum pads, 15 Zildjians, nimrods, dingbats, mics,....that's all I can remember without walking downstairs to the boom boom room (Muscle and Hate Studio) and take notes...

so YES I AM!!! Lovin' every minute of it...

Best wishes...Joel

[valis]

Intel Responds to Fragmentation with New X25-M Firmware

Which not only addresses the micro-fragmentation issue but brings increased performance figures in benchmarks. Looks like Intel is following OCZ's lead in actually listening to the tech bloggers & sites out there. Crowd sourcing anyone?

From the article:

Quoteth Intel: "It should be noted that any of our SSDs will see periods of reduced performance after significant random write fragmentation (white noise random fragmentation, not what Windows generally does with it’s “random” writes) as the drive cleans this all up mixed with additional data being written. This new firmware does not change this fact. What it does do is prevent the drive from getting into a state where further sequential writing will not recover the drive. You should see this with HDTach, or a large file copy, or just general use, etc. So, if a drive is in what previously seemed to be a permanently degraded state (as discussed, we still feel this is highly unlikely for a client PC user), and a user installs the new firmware they will feel an instant improvement for any sequential operations, which will get better in time as the drive cleans itself up further. This firmware will also prevent the user from getting into such a drastic state of fragmentation, and generally help ensure the sequential write performance is as good as it can be at any moment. This change really has no significant impact on random performance."

[valis]

New processor technology promises big boost to consumer-grade SSDs

[valis]

(this one's just for fun)
Samsung SSD Awesomeness

[dawman]

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... CVRqCjCVRq

untitledzz.jpg

[netguyjoel]

Sure...but you would need a 64 bit OS to see all 12 gb...S|C, from what Ralph has told me in a rescent email...they are working on a 64 bit driver for XCITE & Scope...till then, I guess we're stuck w/ 32 bit os's...

Jimmy V, you would think that would be something pretty high on their agenda....espescially for guys like you, and other multi-card Scope users that need all the DSP they can get..


All my best...

Joel

[dawman]

I got plenty of time.
I have been waffling around and finally decided what to do.
Not because of the hardware but because of the apps I have been using.
Kontakt 3.5 will be released very soon. I just recently bought new content for it from GGee called Plectrum. It's an amazing instrument that sounds like a Piano, Acoutic Guitar, etc.
But the developer is obviously using 3.5 already.
Then my live host is 64bit capable now too.
All of my old libraries can be ( destroyed ) converted in Kontakt 3.5.
Yes 64bit I will be using, and as I said it's woth the wait.

I have friends w/ the MacPro i7's and both of them tell me don't bother since I have an XITE-1. Go for the fast DDR3 1600 8CL RAM. I just wasn't sure, then I saw a Cubendo running 64bit Romplers, which are the wasteful ones like Play & VSL that have all of these ridiculous articulations, fake reverbs and mic placements that sound so-so anyways.
But w/ 12GB's of DDR3 and a UD3 i7/945 he was killing the MacPro's w/ tons more polyphony and larger loads !!! Sweetness........I can get a huge upgrade and thankfully for impatiemtly waiting I can add instruments I need, and convert all of my old favorites. This was WORTH THE WAIT.....

I actually am so excited I forgot to post this as a jpeg....
Maybe I am tired of that now too.

[netguyjoel]

My new MB is Intel DP45SG - I'll be doin a 1066 FSB, but RAID 5 (5) 1 TB SATA HDs and 1 250 GB for OS & software

This however, will reserve me the option of running a 32 bit OS or a 64 bit OS when I decide to upgrade...

Best wishes...

Joel

[siriusbliss]

Geez, doesn't ALL this stuff seem ENTIRELY overkill nowadays anyways?

I mean, doing all this PC updates just to handle lame (supposedly) 64-bit VST's and ROMplers?

Seems insane to me (even though I look forward to blowing up Omnisphere and big Kontakt libraries in the future).

Greg

[netguyjoel]

My sentiments exactly...

In my opinion (for whatever that's worth) the Scope/Xite DSP chips will tackle all of the scope load...my main goal is, exceed the RAM limits of the 32 bit OS...for products like NI's and other VST huge sample libs. Additional CPU & bus speed for Arturia & other CPU greedy VSTs

That's why scrapping an old 3.0 P4 w/ 3 gb ram & going to what I described above and remain flexible enough to go to a 64 bit OS/PC & slam the RAM.....if ya' know what I mean!!!


Best Wishes Greg...

Joel

[valis]

Well from my perspective I've already been using XP Pro 64bit (server2k3 kernel) since mid-2005 for large print & 3d projects. I've found it largely unsuitable for almost all of my music hardware, though most music software works reasonably well (my RME interface does actually work). There are some audio users who do use this OS, and those who do know what they're doing and why they're doing it. Aside from that I think the majority of PlanetZ users can safely skip this version of XP as it's already at the end of its life anyway.

Any company that's focusing on 64bit now (for audio or otherwise) is going to be focusing on Vista-64 & Win7-64. Again the majority of users here probably don't need those OS's yet, but if you do you know why you want it and what you're facing in using it. I actually purchased Vista-64 sp1 a year ago thinking that now that sp1 was out (new kernel based on server2008 and many fixes) I might finally be able to migrate back to a single OS for all things. But I found most of my music hardware was still 'coming along', gaming still had issues and many of my 'normal' daily use applications still faced issues with UAC & the separation of 64bit & 32bit applications (even Textpad & Notepad++ have issues trying to open an ini file if I don't 'Run as Administrator' first). That's the case even today...

I also now have Win7-64 installed on this PC in place of my never-used Vista-64 partition (the 10% of my work under Xp64 still works great there). This is from MS's public beta which will *expire* and not be migrateable so I've got 0 work going under that OS. It's only there because I suspect when I do move from Xp32 completely it's going to be to Win7 instead of Vista, given how long this is taking. I still do all of my windows based music stuff under Xp32, most of my other work (including graphics & web outside of what was mentioned in first paragraph) and even most of my gaming still (Directx10 is nice but I removed my Vista-64 partition to play with Win7).

Over the past year I've been slowly replacing things that I'm doubtful will ever have 64-bit support (behringer's USB controllers, m-audio's midi interfaces etc) but even with most of hardware being 'ready' I still don't have a *need* to move everything to 64bit. I spend perhaps 10% of my worktime in Xp-64 (which works well for those projects) and otherwise haven't needed Vista64 (or Win7-64). Mind you I'm not doing huge commercial productions using multiple massive romplers & 100+ audio tracks...so I have 0 use as of yet for 64bit memory space for my audio stuff.

At the same time it's obvious that *some day* 64bit will be mainstream and that includes music, so we discuss how things are progressing and share what we find.