SSD Report 500 Gig Boot Drive. Thumbs Up. NOT! Two Year Follow Up

I finally got my new computer more or less figured out.
 
It uses a 500 gig SSD (solid state drive) for the boot.
 
I also specified an i7 4770 processor and 16 gigs of memory.
 
I wanted to let everybody know that so far I am very satisfied with the speed.
 
With my last computer (which was not slow). I had to wait a moment for recording to start.  Sometimes I would make a mess of things because I would hit keys in a rapid succession, like w, ctrl z, and r (rewind to beginning, delete last recording, and start a new recording). On the prior machine the moment of pause between commands would cause undesirable result.
 
Now the recording starts just as I hit the R key. Commands are instantaneous.
 
Also, Windows and Sonar both boot quickly. I used to not want to sign off Sonar and sign back on because of the delay. But now its real quick. About 3 seconds to get into Sonar. 10 seconds to load a good sized song with fair amount of plugs and soft synths. Less than one second to load a simple song with only two tracks and a two plugs. Close to instantaneous to close a song or close Sonar.
 
What I didn't realize about SSD until I bought one is that the larger they are, the faster. Each time you double the size, the speed also more or less doubles. So a 512 gig will be twice as fast as a 256. I imagine its because they build the drive like a conventional RAID. Two drives RAIDed together will be twice as fast as the drives separately, and theoretically four drives four times as fast as one. At least it makes sense to me, the information highway is twice as big each time you double the size.
 
Since the speed of the boot drive is so fast, it makes no sense to use a second drive to store the audio data. This I find to be convenient.
 
Having a fast processor and 16 gigs of memory doesn't hurt.
 
The thing is really quiet too. The other hard drives shut down when not being used, and the cooler for the CPU is one of those new liquid coolers. The video is built into the CPU so there is no video card fan. The ASUS board has all kinds of fan management built in to control the fan on the liquid cooler and the power supply.
 
About 10 years ago, I used a separate computer for Sonar, and another for general use. Now, partly because computers have improved, and partly because I am not trying to be an audio pro, I only use one. This new box is fast for other programs also, which is really nice.
 
Its not nirvana here with computers, though.
 
Windows 8 is making me nuts. I have to admit I am struggling with Sonar X3 since I went from 8.5 to X2 to X3 in a couple months time, along with a new operating system and hardware.
 
I am using the video provided by the CPU that is built in. There seems to be no way to make it fit the monitor, so there is about a one inch unused black space all around the usable image. I don't know if I need a new monitor or a video card.
 
For some reason my keyboard will occasionally just quit working and I have to reboot. And no, its not bad batteries in the keyboard. Once I was waiting to the last second to buy something on Ebay. I went to place the bid, but the keyboard was dead and I couldn't type in the amount of the bid. So, using the still functioning mouse, I rebooted, signed onto Ebay, and placed the winning bid. I was able to do this in a very short period, but it should not have been a problem in the first place.
 
From my experience, the SSD is the way to go. They are running US$300 to $500 for a nice 500 gig Samsung model right now.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Don't know where you get your info on SSD and RAID speeds. Interesting.

Glad you're happy with your new PC.

I didn't want to be a jerk and say you didn't have a clue what you were saying or something like that. I hoped my comment would make you take another look at your info and you did. Either way you've got an awesome piece of kit and you know more than you did before. That's the best all of us can get. I'm no expert either. Enjoy.

This is a 2 year follow up.
 
I no longer use SSD drives.
 
I didn't realize how few times you can write to them.
 
My operating system, windows 8.1 got more and more unstable and had to re-build itself several times and finally just became unusable.
 
I changed all of my file structure to not write to the SSD (ie downloads, audio files, etc). But the machine just was not stable.
 
I got way too many blue screens with various Windows error messages.
 
I tried cloning and replacing the SSD twice. Samsung Magician, the SSD management software, always reported that the drives were good, but I replaced it anyway.
 
I really am not sure if the culprit was the SSD or some other thing like a bad MOBO, but at this point in the game I have decided to eliminate what appears to be an extra un-needed complexity. The speed enhancements are not worth potential instability.  I was under the belief that the SSD would be more reliable than a whirling platter, but now I believe the opposite.
 
So I am having a new computer built with a regular, conventional hard drive for the boot.
 
So that is my follow up.
 
 

Thanks for reporting back, pharoh. So often posters make an announcement and never return. And we don't get that many long-term reports from SSD users.
 
It's true that SSDs have a short lifespan compared to conventional drives, because you can only write to them so many times before they become unreliable. Even before they start misbehaving they start losing storage capacity as unusable sectors are gradually mapped out. The newer ones delay this by spreading the writes out over the whole matrix so that the cells age uniformly. But if you were using one for your C: drive and the virtual memory swap device was located there (as it is by default), then you were unknowingly writing to that SSD far more often than you realized. It's not surprising that it would "wear out" quickly in that role.
 
I do not currently use SSDs, but probably will in the near future. However, they will be treated as write-once devices and be used solely for sample libraries, and will be mirrored to a conventional hard drive. 

bitflipper
Thanks for reporting back, pharoh. So often posters make an announcement and never return. And we don't get that many long-term reports from SSD users.
 
It's true that SSDs have a short lifespan compared to conventional drives, because you can only write to them so many times before they become unreliable. Even before they start misbehaving they start losing storage capacity as unusable sectors are gradually mapped out. The newer ones delay this by spreading the writes out over the whole matrix so that the cells age uniformly. But if you were using one for your C: drive and the virtual memory swap device was located there (as it is by default), then you were unknowingly writing to that SSD far more often than you realized. It's not surprising that it would "wear out" quickly in that role.
 
I do not currently use SSDs, but probably will in the near future. However, they will be treated as write-once devices and be used solely for sample libraries, and will be mirrored to a conventional hard drive. 

I imagined that windows was still writing to the drive but I didn't know about memory swaps.
 
My machine had 16 gigs of memory. I was using an EVO 840 at first and then went to and EVO 850. Might have been an 840 Pro in the middle, I forget. But when I cloned them I think they cloned the defects. It even cloned the drives write specs as reported in Samsung Magician, if I am not wrong.
 
Interesting idea about using them for sample library. I don't really use sample playback much, but I might in the future.  Plus I could put my huge MP3 (85,000 tunes) on them. Thanks for the idea because I have three of these expensive things all 500 gigs that I didn't plan to use anymore. The idea is to use them for lookup only, not writing. If they fail no big deal. Of course a "lookup only" drive is very easy to keep backed up.  Will keep this in mind.
 
BTW, I am happy to hear if someone else has good luck with these, it very well could have been some other thing causing my problem. In fact it is a safe assumption it was actually caused by CIA spying on my sonar projects!
 
 

After reading this post, I decided to do some looking around for the average lifespan of a SSD drive.  The newer ones are getting better with life span.
 
http://betanews.com/2014/12/05/modern-ssds-can-last-a-lifetime/
 
 

I have 24gb of RAM, so my usage doesn't generally trigger paging. I also have a very minimal size paging file on my HDD and not on my SSD.

mettelus
 
 
Did you clone the SSD to the HDD when you switched back to an HDD?

Going from scratch.  New MOBO(ASUS Sabertooth Mark 1), Boot drive (WD Blue) and memory. New copy of Windows (this time ver 10).  Going to have a clean registry again.
 
Man is it a pain to track down all of those licenses and downloads. I have way too many softwares. But it has to happen every couple years, in my experience.
 
Is your logo an Avanti convertible? Ray Loewy never left well enough alone.