"paulhcp"

"Alegria"
... the most beneficial role of an SSD is for samples (large demanding libraries like EastWest's Hollywood series and system resource hungry VSTs like Spectrasonics Trillian and Omnisphere).

This would be my reason for upgrading. Can you explain this in more detail as I question how much more the performance is improved?

When dealing with demanding libraries such as EastWest's Hollywood Strings and/or Brass, it's impossible to load every sample of a large template into memory even by today's standards. Streaming from disk becomes a necessity and random and/or sequential reads performance becomes the most important factor to look out for. Today's better SSDs can easily outperform mechanical drives by a factor of 100 to 1 on random reads. Furthermore, SSDs can sequentially read at rates greater than 500MB/s which is approx. 4 times the rate of conventional 7200 rpm mechanical drives. Since you are performing read operations only when streaming from disk, you are taking full advantage of the strength of the SSD architecture. They shine in this area and have no equal. And since Win 7 for example doesn't write the last access stamp by default, you completely avoid write operations which is an area where SSDs don't perform as well.

There's no substitute for RAM. Always get as much as you can. Then, depending on your needs and the sample libraries you will be using, SSDs although still very expensive on a per GB comparison with HDs, will definitely make a big difference in this particular context. As always IMHO.

Also, when dealing with SSDs, please keep in mind the following:

1] NEVER fully format an SSD. Use "quick format" only.
2] Don't benchmark your SSD too often (creates unnecessary writes).
3] NEVER defrag your SSD (although by default Win 7 will deactivate fragmentation for recognized SSDs).
4] Always leave approx. 20% free space on your SSD to allow it to do it's thing optimally.
5] Love your SSD and it will love you back. ;)


More info here (although a little dated, it's still a great read)

MSDN Blogs > Engineering Windows 7 > Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives


Hope this is helpful to you,

jc

why leave 20% of your SSD free if it is only used for readfing and not writing?
 
thanks.

"hatflyer"
why leave 20% of your SSD free if it is only used for readfing and not writing?

In the context of a dedicated audio samples SSD, you can lower this recommended percentage drastically (down to around 5% of real capacity). Where you need to be careful is the OS file system in use which may track last-access times, hence creating writes. Windows 7 does not do this by default, but older OSs do, and this needs to be deactivated to help maintain optimum performance and prolong the lifespan of the SSD.

bapu

Freddie H


How is Sonar doing with an SSD?


Working great thanks. Make sure you use INTEL SSD. It's the best and most reliable!

So it Matters?

 
 
Yes it does!