The wait is over!!!! 1TB SSD HDs are coming!

One of the latest hardware trends seems to be Solid State Drive (SSD) Raids. We already mentioned the 24 monster SSD Raid video that was uploaded to Youtube as part of Samsungs campaign to promote their SSD drives. This is obviously nothing that end users will ever user as it is hardly affordable and practical.

OCZ on the other hand seems to be one of the driving forces in SSD technology at this point in time. Their OCZ Vertex drives look really promising in both read and write performance. Old Solid State Drives usually excelled in read performance but lacked the necessary write performance.


Their latest hardware that was first shown at the Cebit in Germany is the OCZ Z-Drive. This piece of computer hardware is connected via PCI Express to a computer system taking up two slots because of its dimensions. It is made up of four 256 Gigabyte MLC-based OCZ Solid State Drives and 256 Megabytes of ECC DDR2 RAM. This adds up to a total storage capacity of 1 Terabyte and promises maximum read rates of 600 MB/s and read rates of 500 MB/s. The sustained write speed is said to be 400 MB/s.

http://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/ocz_z-drive-500x254.jpg

The only drawback is the hefty price tag which is expected to be between $1500 and $2000. The OCZ Z-Drive is expected to be available in April 2009 with additional models following later this year.

The 1Gigabyte HDs were starting also around 2000 K. I would say in 1year they could be affordable

I want a 256 GB SSD just for a couple of GOTO sample libraries... but will RAMPLERS allow 100% read from disk?

ORIGINAL: midimal

One of the latest hardware trends seems to be Solid State Drive (SSD) Raids. We already mentioned the 24 monster SSD Raid video that was uploaded to Youtube as part of Samsungs campaign to promote their SSD drives. This is obviously nothing that end users will ever user as it is hardly affordable and practical.

OCZ on the other hand seems to be one of the driving forces in SSD technology at this point in time. Their OCZ Vertex drives look really promising in both read and write performance. Old Solid State Drives usually excelled in read performance but lacked the necessary write performance.


Their latest hardware that was first shown at the Cebit in Germany is the OCZ Z-Drive. This piece of computer hardware is connected via PCI Express to a computer system taking up two slots because of its dimensions. It is made up of four 256 Gigabyte MLC-based OCZ Solid State Drives and 256 Megabytes of ECC DDR2 RAM. This adds up to a total storage capacity of 1 Terabyte and promises maximum read rates of 600 MB/s and read rates of 500 MB/s. The sustained write speed is said to be 400 MB/s.

http://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/ocz_z-drive-500x254.jpg

The only drawback is the hefty price tag which is expected to be between $1500 and $2000. The OCZ Z-Drive is expected to be available in April 2009 with additional models following later this year.

The 1Gigabyte HDs were starting also around 2000 K. I would say in 1year they could be affordable

Any 7200 rpm SATA drive will be more than enough to handle high-bandwidth audio. Speed freaks can still buy the 300-gb WD Velociraptor (10000 rpm, super-fast cache) and it will STILL be considerably cheaper than SSD. SSD will probably be mainstream and cheap in a couple of years.

ORIGINAL: PaPi


Any 7200 rpm SATA drive will be more than enough to handle high-bandwidth audio. Speed freaks can still buy the 300-gb WD Velociraptor (10000 rpm, super-fast cache) and it will STILL be considerably cheaper than SSD. SSD will probably be mainstream and cheap in a couple of years.

Hi!

Dont forget - SSD drives like this 1TB are not only A LOT of faster than any mechanical drive they are noiseless and never need the defragmentation

IF that driver performs as stated and we have moved to Windows 7 so the fill issues MIGHT be overcome by "trim"

and its priced at $300 or so then it might be worth it.

there is NO reason for SSD as a recording drive.
i have yet to have a client who was unable to accomplish the task with Sata.
some of my clients for post to film have over 300 tracks.
others reaching 100 @ 96k

so why would i pay for this?

quiet? dont make me laugh. while yes the loudest thing in a properly built system is the HDDs
its still not loud at all.

fact is SSDs are the future but untill they drop in price and work as they should
i will stick to using them as an OS at best.

i forgot to add i love my OCZ Apex 120G! as an OS drive

ORIGINAL: Jim Roseberry

quiet? dont make me laugh. while yes the loudest thing in a properly built system is the HDDs
its still not loud at all.

fact is SSDs are the future but untill they drop in price and work as they should
i will stick to using them as an OS at best.

Exactly
Someone recently said something about our site not even offering SSDs...
It's not by accident/happen-stance.
I just don't see the point...
With quiet 1TB HDs that sustain 110MB/Sec available for ~$100 , SSDs just aren't necessary.

100USD for TB with 110MB/s is fantastic no question
but 600MB/s are simply 6x faster - ok @ the moment too expensive - but if the price drops they will win for sure :)

ORIGINAL: Jim Roseberry

100USD for TB with 110MB/s is fantastic no question
but 600MB/s are simply 6x faster - ok @ the moment too expensive - but if the price drops they will win for sure :)

I certainly understand your point about 6x faster...
But what will the extra (6x) performance allow (that's not already possible)?
IOW, I'll be able to run 800 solid 24Bit/44.1k audio tracks.
That's definitely faster... but... I don't see much practical difference.
I can already run far more tracks of audio than I need in any given project.

The one area where the extra speed will come in handy is for folks who need massive polyphony (1024+ voices) from disk-streaming sample libraries.

SSD incorporated into laptops and other small form factor PCs... where it would afford them much longer battery-life and extremely high performance (in a portable footprint) would be a lot more exciting to me.

Jim Dude

I am thinking to use SSD discs not only for audio playback/recording whithin Sonar but also for loading/streaming f.e. Omnisphere patches (which can be 400-600MB) so read speed for such things counts of course. And once again huge perorfmance NOISELESS :)

midimal

Their latest hardware that was first shown at the Cebit in Germany is the OCZ Z-Drive. This piece of computer hardware is connected via PCI Express to a computer system taking up two slots because of its dimensions. It is made up of four 256 Gigabyte MLC-based OCZ Solid State Drives and 256 Megabytes of ECC DDR2 RAM. This adds up to a total storage capacity of 1 Terabyte and promises maximum read rates of 600 MB/s and read rates of 500 MB/s. The sustained write speed is said to be 400 MB/s.

 
This is misleading. What they are doing is adding up the individual maximum read and write rates of each individual drive. But it doesn't work that way in the real world. You cannot expect even in a RAID system for this to happen so cleanly. If you do the actual IOMETER tests, HD Tune, or other related analysis tests, you will still find that the OCZ Vector will still only attain about 250MB/s per drive, at its very best. Now that is still an excellent speed, but even this is misleading. You are talking about sustained read and write rates, which only is the most important if you are dealing huge multi-gigabyte files trasnfers all the time. But if you are dealing with myriads of small files, this is not the case as sustained read/write rates are not indicative of this. Random read/write rates are the key here. Focusing only on sustained read/write rates only does not reflect the real world loading and tasking of these drives. Even more important is that the random read and write drives tend to be much slower, especially if you fill up the drives, because of the way the OS works, Random read/write operations are the order of the day for OS basic operations. Also, there is the problem that these reported high sustained read/write rates reflect "new" status, where the drives are fresh and are not filled up. The speed will deteriorate as you fill up the drive. Of course, once you introduce TRIM into the equation, you will blunt that deterioration quite a bit. Yet another consideration is that these purported speeds don't mean a thing unless you are using SATA III connections. SATA II is limited to 300 MB/s. The new SATA III will go to 600 MB/s
 
Bottom Line, the X-25M's and X-25E's are still the kings of the hill, but the OCZ Vector is indeed a reasonable substitute, money wise, in comparison to the Intels. But the RAID configuration promises made here on the OCZ are very likely exaggerated. Also Samsung  may have been in ther business of making SSD a lot longer than anyone else, and they make more drives than anyone else, and sell them to a lot of important third party users (Apple, Lenovo, etc.), but they are NOT that fast at all. Compared to the Intels, they are slow pokes.
 
I run full orchestral MIDI'd scores using EWQLSO platinum, runing as many as 50 to 100 MIDI'd instrument tracks, so the streaming can add up quite a bit. I use Intel X25E's, three of then in my Laptop. My problem is I need more space as I hold my samples in two external X-25M's in eSATA. I am thinking of switching to the 256 Gb OCZ Vector, but I will take a hit in performance. I need to investigate exactly the kind of data transfer stresses that occur when I run SONAR .cwp files as full of MIDI'd instrument tracks like I do. Bandwidth is important, but speed becomes critical in this situation as well.