During exports, CPU would normally be the bottleneck, not I/O. Where the SSD shines is booting up, loading projects and loading sampled instruments.
 
At the moment, only my boot drive is an SSD. I want to have one for my Kontakt libraries but it would have to be at least 1TB. Although those have come down, they are still $300. So for the time being I'd rather spend that money on more Kontakt libraries and just continue to exercise patience.
 
They'll come down further, I'm sure. I can remember the first time I worked on a 1 GB drive, c. 1982, at a Seattle bank's bond-trading department. it was the size of a washing machine and cost $60,000. And they trusted me to take it apart and put it back together! They would have had a frickin' cow had they known that my assistant and I had been smokin' dope on the way there.

Bit,
 
The SSD for me is nice because I can record as many takes as I like.
When I pile up the recorded tracks into the 100s, I sometimes get IO related drop outs.
 
Also, the speed of creation of wave forms is faster. This is important for projects with 16 tracks and hours of recording.
 
Lastly, the speed of saving projects with large amounts of midi is faster.
 
I understand that bouncing isn't enhanced. When you bounce tracks, how high does your processor go? I was sort of thinking it might go up to 80% or so, but I guess not.

I almost never see my CPU over 40-50%. That's largely because I keep my buffers at 2048.

I'm talking about max processing during a fast bounce.
 
I was thinking that the reason it only goes to 50% (some on each available processor when viewed with resource monitor) might have something to do with hyper-threading.
 
If the processors show double capacity due to the presumption of hyper-threading and hyper-threading is not used, then the maximum processing would be around 50%.

Hi there:)
 
Partition C
 
Windows + Sonar + other Music Software --> 256 GB SSD
 
Partition Record
 
--> 256 GB SSD
 
Partition Cakewalk Content
 
--> 512 GB SSD
 
Partition Samples
 
--> 1000 GB HD on sATA
 
I'm just waiting for a cheap TB SSD for my Samples Partition. 
SSDs are the greatest step on speedup your PC, after more RAM! I have only an i5, but with 32 GB RAM and my SSDs I've never had any (speed) problems yet!
 
Greetz,
Bassman.
 

I see your point, Geoff. Seeing high CPU usage would be expected, even desirable, during a fast bounce. (But you can't measure it with SONAR's CPU meter. Instead you'll have to go by the Windows Performance Monitor.)
 
I just exported a large-ish project, only 16 tracks but most are unfrozen Kontakt tracks with large orchestral libraries. SONAR's CPU meter sat at around 50% and never moved, as expected. According to perfmon, CPU usage briefly peaked at 30% but averaged lower than that. Clearly, my CPU wasn't being challenged at all.
 
This observation would suggest that my previous statement is BS, since it's clearly I/O constriction that made the export take nearly a minute. I am not writing to an SSD, however, but rather to a conventional 7200 RPM drive.

TBH, I've never monitored it myself.
The only thing I noticed was the same time at which Exports took and the whining of my CPU stepping up like someone was sticking a fork in its bum.

Lol. Nice Chuck. I think we are all confirming the same. When doing fast bounces using hyper threaded CPUs, activity stays around fifty percent.

I'm taking this too mean that this is actually maxed activity.

@bit...
I was monitoring with resource monitor. That shows consumption by processor.

If there is some property I could toggle that would enable me to use more processor power, I would try it.

Does anyone ever see processors go above sixty percent when doing a fast bounce?... assuming you aren't doing crazy stuff in other apps at the same time.

CPU is at 50% because that's all the time that's available to it. A CPU at 60% vs. 50% means the CPU is able to devote more time working on things like DSP. So higher CPU utilization can actually be a good thing.
 
Here's why: an export involves writing to disk, and even an SSD is still many times slower than even a modest CPU. That means the CPU spends a lot of time waiting for data transfers to finish. If you somehow had a drive with zero latency, the CPU utilization would be very high because it would be spending less time waiting on semaphores that tell the system when the drive is ready for another block.
 
This is why investing in an SSD delivers more bang for the buck than a CPU upgrade. At least when it comes to exporting data.