LpMike75

twaddle
Using ssd drives for sample drives is complete overkill IMHO as a 7200rpm or 1000rpm drive provides more than adequate bandwidth
for sample streaming and the biggest difference you'll feel will be in your wallet.
You will notice a vast improvement in boot up times, program loading times and quietness if you use an ssd drive as your os drive.
 
Having said that ssd drives all through will make your whole system that much quieter.
What so many people don't realise when buying ssd drives is that when the drives fail recovery is not so easy as with disk drives and often expensive so I personally would not want to keep my important data on them for that reason along with the cost.
 
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/data-recovered-failed-ssd/
 
 
Steve
 
 

From my understanding, SSD drives will offer the most improvement in recording/mixing when used with your large sample libraries, like Hollywood Strings, Brass, LASS etc.  Having it for your OS will offer faster load times, but no increase performance in recording/mixing.  Of course, if you don't have large CPU intensive sample libraries, then a normal drive would suffice.

Absolutely. IMO, all sample libraries should be on a separate SSD if you use pro level libraries as you mentioned. I have mine on SSD's (EastWest Hollywood Strings, Omnispehere, etc) and the load times are extremely fast, and there are no issues with streaming. Having the OS and DAW on a SSD is a waste of money, you are really only increasing your boot time by seconds. 

Small SSDs for OS and audio data coupled with big external hard drives for backup and samples works for me.  I suspect the SSD improves more than just boot times as an OS drive, speeding up disk access for software and OS behind the scenes as well.
 
The biggest advantage to solid state drives for me is that they are silent.  Sample and backup drives don't need to be spinning all the time, so that the entire system can be acoustically dead silent when necessary if the computer is fanless as well.
 
If you have the money, obviously a large SSD for samples would also be ideal.

Just an aside quick for the OP. I do not see system specs for your computer, so before you think "SSD" make sure you have SATA3 connection points. Putting an SSD on a SATA2 port is a waste (you will never see the speed they provide).
 
SSD's function similar to RAM in that data can be pulled from memory cells as fast as the hardware will allow (no moving parts), so the OS/Program drive has the bigger need for this functionality. That being said, +1 to all of the posts for SSD as the OS/Program drive. SATA3 HDD work well to store projects and volumes of data cheaply. And +1000 to the "Backups! Backups! Backups!"
 
If you have not owned an SSD, depending on your OS, there are things you must know about them. This is the example for Win7 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2727880 ).
 
 
 
 

Yeah, I've got an SSD for OS and programs, and it seems to me the best use. I haven't experienced a hard drive streaming bottleneck in about 10 years or more, so it's not a problem that needs solving as far as I can see.
 
On the other hand, the experience of booting up fast, loading Sonar fast, launching plugins fast, passing audio in and out of external editors fast; that's a tangible, and sizeable, improvement in your working day.

I want to go fully SSD eventually, as the hard drives are the last part of my computer that isn't completely silent. But it's not a pressing need; going to wait for prices to drop some more.

Mettelus is right that you should do your research beforehand. There are all kinds of differences to remember, eg: never defrag an SSD, it just shortens its life and has no effect on performance. Also, some SSDs are not actually all that fast. Read up on how to understand the read / write performance stats.
 

If your projects are large and complex, then a dedicated SSD for projects would be beneficial, as they would load faster.

Some drives are fast at reading but slow to write.  These would be best used for sample libaries.

eric_peterson
Sort of on pause here ... I have a 2TB raid mirror in my DAW for long term project storage, and a external 3TB USB drive for Acronis backups. I'm currently only trusting this drive. 
 
I am going to buy a different brand SSD to replace the type that failed repeatedly.
 

OCZs problems with their SSD drives were pretty well publicized.  I believe they have the problems sorted now, but yeah, I'd probably go with another brand too.

Regarding SSD vs traditional HDDs, it's horses for courses.  Remember that traditional magnetic platter drives are actually faster for large sequential writes than SSDs are.  Also, SSDs are limited in the total number of write operations before their cells start to fail.  So because you are writing lots of data when recording, this is best suited to a magnetic drive.
 
So for me, it's an SSD for the OS and for Sonar and soft-synths, etc (mainly file reads).  But all my Sonar projects write to a large, fast magnetic drive (lots of file writes).