Mixing on SSD

[spacef]

Anyone has tried mixing on SSD ?
As mixing is more about read than write, did you see a real improvement compared to a HD with 64MB cache ?

It's because sometimes, at the end of a project, it happens that I experience a few crackles in the audio, and I wonder if moving the song to a SSD would improve this (ie, at the "almost done stage of the project).

I read a lot of stuff about SSDs so I really don't know what to expect. But I guess that, if it is good for loading samples fast, then it must be good for reading long and short audio files in a cubase project ?

Thanks

[dawman]

Negative on the SSD beating the Mechanical drives using 64MB of cache.

[dawman]

I have an 80GB SSD from Kingston which is a couple years old and great for the OS+Apps because of the access times.
I also have Seagate Momentus XL Hybrids which are an excellent choice for anything audio.
I also have the Corsair 128GB SSD thinking its specs would relate as well to audio.........Negative again.

It seems each software app has its own strengths and weaknesses.
I recently downloaded the 4.2 BETA using NCW technology from NI for Kontakt, and my age old Raptor JBOD array using the old idea of spanning content is working incredibly well.
Kontakt is really starting to impress me, as I was just about to pass the Raptors over to Scope 4 Live Junior.

I do know that the access times are great for added polyphony using streaming apps, but the WD Caviar w/ 64MB of cache is as good as it gets for audio. Especially if one takes in the cost per GB......

64bit was a scam, Microsoft is a scam, and SSD is one of the best rip offs I have participated in as well.
IMHO, it seems the 7200rpm's w/ 64MB of cache are even better than my Raptors.
I am not ashamed of falling for the hype of 10k drives either.
I have spent thousands being a sucker.

[tjsound]

helps me to disable all network interfaces during the mix. type and speed of the hard drives does not matter.

[valis]

Type & speed matters here, though for 'straight' track mixing any modern 7200rpm drive should provide a lot of performance.

Jimmy Raptors were fine in their time, and they brought more than just 10k rpm to the table (shock resistance matters when there's half a dozen or more in a rack, as does TLER timeout settings and so on.) If Velociraptors had kept pace with the rest of the desktop drive set (larger sizes & smaller prices) maybe we'd be talking about them still. The density of current 7200rpm drive platters combined with the 64MB cache does give a lot of performance, this is true! And most users don't need RAID let alone 10k drives in a RAID anyway

SpaceF, SSD's are good for sample library material and/or OS+Apps drive (personally I want one for a gaming drive too so I spend less time watching load screens in my few gaming moments that are getting fewer & fewer.) For read+write applications though they are a mixed bag, and imo given the cost you'd be better served by spreading stuff out over cheaper 7200rpm drives (which Jimmy was perhaps suggesting?) I still partition my drives and tend to get the 1 to 1.5TB drives now, dedicate the first 1/4 to 1/3 of the drive for 'performance' tasks and the rest for storage or lesser accessed data (and movies etc.) I'm up to 5 drives in my main Win7 system now but imo that's not necessary for most, I do a mixture of web/graphics/video and music and have to spread that workflow out.

[jksuperstar]

I wouldn't for recording. I do use one for my live rig, which loads programs, loads patches, and loads samples really FAST. But I would definitely not write a lot to it. Wear-leveling is used because the write life of SSDs is pretty short. So I use an external FireWire on my laptop for recording instead.

[spacef]

>>>>>>
SpaceF, SSD's are good for sample library material and/or OS+Apps drive (personally I want one for a gaming drive too so I spend less time watching load screens in my few gaming moments that are getting fewer & fewer.) For read+write applications though they are a mixed bag, and imo given the cost you'd be better served by spreading stuff out over cheaper 7200rpm drives
>>>>>>

Yes, I am in such a configuration.
I don't think i have a HD of less than 500 mb, all caviar black 32MB cache, the latest one being a caviar black 64MBcahe (1To) on which i get around 80/100 mb/s transfer rate on the 250 gb parition i use for songs. (I also cut all my disk in 3 or 4 partitions. (at least) the first partition being 1/3 - 1/4th of the size (first partitions are faster: on another disk, a very old maxtor, i can go up to 60/70 on first partition, but only 5/10 on the last one) so it's like i have 4 or 5 partitions for music: 1 for os/soft, 1 for songs, one for rom banks, one for wave samples, another one for Kontakt/Maschine banks.... The space that is not used for pro-audio is for medias, downloads, backups, scope building devices, images, "my documents", etc. my latest partition is disk "S" ... 17 partitions....

I begin to think my problem could be cpu: i have slight improvements if i disable all that is running in the background like antivirus, virtual disk, backup softwares etc..... but it is not always enough.

I hoped an SSD would help improving he perfoemance without the need to change the computer for an i7 mega wooga setup....(which involves changing mobo, ram, cpu, psu, and reinstall everything again (if you saw the cabling behind the pc... )... but i guess I was wrong on that one.... I guess will still have to bounce tracks for a while to remove the effects that I keep on the last mix stage....

I was impressed by the perf. at a friends who has an i7-950 and all the latest stuff , and a SSD for OS+soft and another one for samples, that can load Kontakt banks in a blink... i will try to go to him and test his mechanical drives and see if it is his SSD or CPU that is improving stuff that way...
he has a backup soft that backups all the ssd into a mechanical drive in case of future problem.

Thanks a lot for the answers and clarifications....

(ps edit: lots of partitions is also the best insurance for less loss after bad crashes.... even in case of disk failure, other partitions are generally not affected... so backup, backups of backups, and lots of partitions, it's good for everything!)

[siriusbliss]

See for programs.
Esata for projects
Adjust buffer settings in host.
Turn off all background processes
Add more RAM
I've had most success with this approach.


Greg

[jksuperstar]

SpaceF, have you used FSAutostart? On windows XP it is free (it has been updated for win 7/etc, but I don't use that one yet : http://alacritypc.kensalter.com/). I found that as I posted this, so I'll have to take a look at Alacrity vs. FSautostart.

I swear by it for many years now, it can be easily configured to shut down all the services, background tasks, programs, etc (I even shut down explorer to save RAM and all the spurious network traffic it creates (not inet explorer, but the windows browser, since it tends to keep looking for net attached printers, computers, etc)). It can also start several programs in a sequence with time between, so I can start SCOPE, then Ableton 15 seconds later. When you are done, it reloads everything as it was before.

Before I got XITE, I had an EMU 1616m that had 10ms latency before, and as low as 3ms after running FSAutostart (lower cpu use, but I could never get that low before). It has helped me hold on to laptops for much longer

[spacef]

Hi Jk, I knew nothing about those two softs, but they seem to answer needs I've had for years
autostarting apps in a certain order,and with editable delays... wow real neat... i was struggling with command lines before, and was not very successful.
the ability to shut down services and apps at once sounds like a real time saver.

I am reinstalling the w7x64 partition (which was broken after a week, a few weeks ago), and i will give a go to those softwares after i do the install and backup everything (backups on w7 seems to be the very first thing to do.... i learned my lesson), then i will be able to experiment again. I 'm not quite there yet, but thanks a lot for the links, they are bookmarked in my "w7 PC Geek" bookmark folder now (it's prestigious to be in that folder )

many thanks !!

[bosone]

i'm planning to buy an ssd for windows 7.
i read that it really improves windows performance and it boots very very fast
is it really worth?

in a 64 GB SSD drive will i be able to store 2 installations of win7 + program (standard+audio optimized)?

[spacef]

64 seems a bit limited for 2 OS, but all depends on how many apps/plugs you're going to install... My xp install is about 50 GB (after 2 - 3 years) and win7 is already 36/37 GB eventhough I haven't finished installing everything... I guess win7 will be around 40 / 50 in a couple of years. Some apps/plugs don't allow to install themselves or libraries on another disk than C:\ so it's good to have headroom. You should look at the size of your XP system disk, and from there evaluate how much you will need during the next 2/3 years (w7 takes 10 GB after install.... that is much more than XP). I hope it helps.

[siriusbliss]

64G will be too small for programs AND plugs.
I have 128, and am already getting full - and I have separate eSATA drives for projects and samples.

Single installation of Win7 Ultimate - for running both 32 and 64-bit apps.

Greg

[valis]

Sadly my Win7 install has already reached 80GB. Thankfully it's a 500GB drive (and I don't store ANY data on my OS drive under the default Windows dirs) but I can't see an SSD in my future for a while unfortunately....200 to 600GB are just too expensive.

(edit fixed my typo!)

[bosone]

180 GB???
what the hell are you installing???
after 5 year i still have 2x20 GB partition for XP, 20 GB music (almost 6 are free!) and normal stuff...
btw, i don't use any game!

[valis]

Adobe CS5 Production suite + lightroom, Autodesk Softimage & Maya (plus more video/graphics/3d apps & utils), Cubase 4/Ableton Live Suite 8 + Max4Live, Komplete7, Wavelab 6, tons of vst plugins (about 2.5GB) and some stock content (most moveable sample material including NI's Komplete libraries are on another drive but things like Reaktor need their libs on that drive) plus quite a bit of open source graphics & music software. Yes it's excessive, but it's better than the days when I needed to boot into 2-3 separate OS installs depending on what I was working on. Probably 10-20GB of that is temp files & audio/video cached material for Premiere/AfterEffects/Ableton etc btw.

Funnily enough I have my 'games' on a separate drive so they're not included in that install size, and I'd love to have them on and SSD with my OS+Apps as well (meaning I really do need 200-400GB (or more) for optimal performance across all my tasks if/when I do go SSD---OR need to spread things out even more?) At least if I want to keep drive usage below 60-75%

[valis]

Woops now I see the confusion, I didn't mean to type 180GB, just 80GB! Although my 10.6.5 OSX install is actually not far off 160GB due to having most of Logic's stock content alongside Ableton Suite 8 library...and Reaktor/etc stuff going back close to a decade.

[spacef]

Funnily enough I have my 'games' on a separate drive so they're not included in that install size, and I'd love to have them on and SSD with my OS+Apps as well (meaning I really do need 200-400GB (or more) for optimal performance across all my tasks if/when I do go SSD---OR need to spread things out even more?) At least if I want to keep drive usage below 60-75%

I'm sure it is as good to have the games on a seperate SSD , it will save you money and should give you the same access times (i suppose, by giving it the full bandwwith of a sata connection, while the OS has its own bandwith for its own drive).... just imagining, that's the strategy i use on my "normal" HDs by spreading the os/apps/samples etc on various drives, so needles and sata bandwith are fully used by each drives, each with a different puprose, so the aim is that needles don't process various infos at the same time, they are all very targeted....


Also, I have brought my Caviar Black 64MB cache to this friend with a fast cpu (i7 950) and SSDs, and really, I cannot tell if there is a big difference: loading kontakt banks from my own HD was very fast (much much faster than on my core2duo E8500 setup, like 10 times faster may be) while from his SSD is it is very fast... but we are talking about miliseconds (ok, may be 10th of a second) and I cannot really compute if there is a big difference... apparently, a fast cpu helps loading stuff faster than a slower cpu, using the same mechanical HD.... may be the SSD had a slight advantage on micro times delays, but it is difficult for humans to be sure of that without a software that calculates the miliseconds... I guess you need to see that in use for a long time to be sure...

[valis]

For games the speedup is worthwhile imo, having something like crysis reload a map in 2 seconds instead of 20 is a big timesaver (when you die over & over eh!) But for OS/apps, there's been a lot of effort over the years to speedup the way computers access data on the HD. I also have a few 64MB 1-1.5TB Caviar Blacks in here and am probably going to upgrade the other drives before an SSD ever makes it in just due to the fact I can replace 3-4 drives for the cost of 1 midsized SSD. And tbh I don't feel that app startup time is a bottleneck for me as things don't take 1-2 mins to load (like games do.)

[spacef]

continuing testing....I am just testing this right now,
with my own C drive into my friend's pc
the loading time from his SSD is uncomparable, on the same cpu, the SSD is much faster.....

So SSD is really better for the OS, and probably better for samples, eventhough at such high cpu speed, it is less noticeable than the os which is clearly booting faster, especially those apps that start at windows start... the ssd is still botting at least twice faster than the HD with an equivalent number of stuff starting at os start....