Has anyone tried SSD Drives yet?

Hi,

I'm considering to get a new Laptop with space for two hard-discs, so that I can upgrade to SSD when they get cheaper. I just wanna know if someone has tried them yet and if their technical advantages (0,1ms access time, 100mb/s transfer rate) really improve working with samples. And furthermore does it decrease loading times (between Performances) of Kore 2?

BurtaN

 

I'd be really interested in hearing about anybody's experiences with them myself =)

ew

 

Push!

 

Anyone using SSDs yet? Especially as they are getting cheaper

 

Push! Now that Intel entered the market? Any official tests by NI?

 

Lucky

Lucky the SSD doesnt require any special support/ drivers on behalf of NI. From what Ive read the performance of intel's drives are outstanding but should be for $600 and only 80gb. Im still waiting on all this to improve before I part with the little money I have.

 

Yes, I know that you can just switch the HDD. I'm interested in details like DFD settings and loading times because of lower memory usage . Indeed 600$ is still very much but the price will be the half in the next month I think .

BurtaN

 

Well I have a EeePc 1000 with two sdd drives and they are pretty slow.

There is an 8GB system drive which is the same sort of speed as a 5.4K disk.

Also has a 32GB drive which is about half the speed.

Apparently there are a couple of different types of drives one type is slow (the ones I have) and the other type is fast. I cannot remember the names.

This http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_core_series_v2_sata_ii_2_5-ssd is one of the quick ones, I am going to upgrade to one of these but am waiting for the price to come down a bit.

Andy

 

Yeah, there are SLC and MLC SSDs. The SLC are fast and expensive and the MLC are less fast and less expensive. Even though Intels SSD are MLC (their SLC come later), they seem to be as fast as other SLC SSDs.

BurtaN

 

Hey,
I just purchased an OCZ Core V2 60GB drive. I'll give some information about it soon...

Greetings,
BurtaN

 

Hi Guys,

My Asus laptop came with a 5400 rpm hard drive but last week I installed a 16Gb Transcend SSD (SLC). Virtually instantaneous read times should minimise latency and lack of heat etc should maximise reliability.

I was warned that SLC is essential if you want to run an operating system from it while MLC is OK for a second drive.
Thankfully 16Gb is fine for my standalone B4-2 (with B4D controller) for live performance since I'm not collecting plugins or building up any data. The soundcard is the Alesis IO2.


The operating system installed fine but I found that latency was being determined by the soundcard drivers, starting at around 65ms and 'improving' to about 23 ms. Having found www.asio4all.com I dumped the Alesis drivers and now I'm down to 8 ms and things sound much tighter. There might be some more to come so I'll come back to you if I can get any nearer to zero latency.

Jez

 

You are right, the random reading speed of MLC's is very low, but as a sample drive that doesn't matter.

 

check this out http://img.tomshardware.com/us/2005/09/07/can_gigabyte/i-ram-top.jpg

 

Hi,
I use a high speed USB stick (32GB, 30MB/s) with Galaxy II piano. (this uses the Kontakt 2 player)
Also tried it with Synthogy Ivory Italian Grand.

Both works fine. Multiple full and fast glissandos with pedal held down works without glitches.

At least for this type of application the transfer speed doesnt seem to matter much. Access time is much more important.

It would be nice if the companys like Syntogy and NI would support that. If the Attack and decay samples could be stored to an USB stick (say with 5 seconds length) and the sustain samples could be stored on the hard disc.
Then a smaller USB stick would do fine and performance might be increased further.

brgds,

Peter

 

Hey, I tried my SSD with Kore 2 and Kontakt 2 and later with Kontakt 3 standalone. Violine, Viola, Cello Sustain playing together with lowest DFD settings. => total memory usage 22mb!

Kore 2 + Kontakt 2 max. ~25voices.
Kontakt 3 standalone max. >120 voices.

Just got Komplete 5 yesterday, so I'll keep on testing.

BurtaN

 

Hi,

I want to add this:

I experimented with different filesystems and clustersizes.
Currently I use Vista's exFat filesystem and a clustersize of 2k for my USB stick.
4k clustersize (default) should work also. Larger clustersizes should be avoided, because the filesystem then is forced to read more data than is needed, when there are small (and fast) data chunks nonsequentially read.

It should be better to avoid NTFS in order to prevent background filesystem checking and such stuff.
(FAT32 or exFAT are fast when there is no fragmentation)
I disabled indexing for that drive and superfetch for the whole machine.

Peter

 

fantastic to get any feedback on SSDs. However, I am MOST interested to know what types of LOAD benefits one might get.

My problem is not streaming, memory, etc, but rather the time it takes to load sounds. for example. switching sounds in Kore can take 5 seconds (or more in some cases). I am hoping the sub-ms random seek times will go a long way to addressing this.

thanks!