Kontakt And SSD (Solid State Drives) Revisited.

With 512GB SSDs in the sub-$1000 range, and with R/W speeds of 200MB/s and above, what are the possibilities with streaming samples entirely from SSDs with little or none of the samples in RAM (DFD Settings I suppose). These drives are lightning fast. I use an MTRON 16GB Express Card SSD for tracking in Pro-Tools. I can easily squeeze 32 Tracks, lots of Reverbs and a ton of VIs from this little baby w/o a hiccup.

Your thoughts . . . .

 

I use an OCZ Throttle E-Sata Flash Drive to stream the

Galaxy II Pianos, (which are pretty heavy with Smp. resonance, release
samples ect...) and I've never seen the disk meter go above the first bar
even with 350+ notes of polyphony! Amazing!
It's rated at 90 MB sec, I believe it!

 

So are you ..

Are you using a 32 bit or 64 Bit system? I was wondering whether us 32 Bit system users (Pro-Tools isn't 64 Bit yet) could play with DFD settings and have the ENTIRE samples played from the drive with an extremely small amount of each instrument being loaded into RAM, since the Flash and SSDs are kind of like RAM in a sense anyway. For us 32 Bit users, this could alleviate the need to jump to 64 Bit for a while.

 

That's absolutely not true since RAM is a magnitude faster than any SSD out there.

Nevertheless I can recommend to use a SSD for faster Sample loading. In this case go for an Intel oder Indilinx Controller based SSD.

In my case I use a Supertalent Ultradrive GX with 256GB.

 

hi
i read an article some time ago on SSD vs optical drives

i believe that its a great idea to use SSD instead of till the time you do more READ Operations .. so as a sample drive it will work very well

but apparently with more wrtie operations.. seems like the performance deteriorates
rapidly ..so if you record on SSD's you will have to replace them by the end of a year .

so after a year of abuse.. the native drives tend to perform better.. the SSD has a shorter life

 

That's actually no true, before buying an SSD you should definetly inform yourself and read about Trim and other SSD related topics. The articles of anandtech magazine are a good starter...


I'm using Win 7 64bit and the SSD is worth every single cent I payed...

 

The good thing with Kontakt is that you can reduce the DFD buffer sizes to very low values. If your instruments use the default 60 kB preload buffer size it should be possible to reduce RAM usage by up to 90% as long as the SDD latency is low enough to handle that.

It would be cool if it were possible to write just the normal 60 kB preload to SDD and then take advantage of the lower memory requirements. That way one wouldn't need to place the full samples on SDD discs. Basically you would for each sample have 8 kB in RAM, read the next 52 kB from the SDD drive and the rest of the sample from the normal hard drive. If such a system were optimized loading even big libraries would be nearly instantaneous.

 

I too have been thinking about going SSD for the sample disk. My libraries are quite large and I will need close to a GIG for my GOTO libraries. Right now, the capacity/value ratio isn't quite comfortable for me yet.

By the way, I was able to lower the default DFD to its lowest value and stream more data direct from disk using a couple of velociraptor drives and not a hiccup.

But, I am very interested in this technology as a READ device and not so much as a WRITE device... sorta like the old WORM laser disks, Write Once, Read Many.

Jim

 

Re: EPU and SSD's

EPU wrote:
Are you using a 32 bit or 64 Bit system? I was wondering whether us 32 Bit system users (Pro-Tools isn't 64 Bit yet) could play with DFD settings and have the ENTIRE samples played from the drive with an extremely small amount of each instrument being loaded into RAM, since the Flash and SSDs are kind of like RAM in a sense anyway. For us 32 Bit users, this could alleviate the need to jump to 64 Bit for a while.
-----------------------
I'm using 32 bit XP and K3.5 with 4 Gig ram. I read somewhere that the seek time on flash ram is about .3ms , (not sure about ssd's) whereas the seek time on your system ram is in the NANO second range. I' think we're stuck using system ram for the forseeable fute , but i'm interested in how far you could drive it down with out stuttering. (I hate driving everything to the brink!)

tkmh

 

hi ,
i don't think what i said was entirely false..
TRIM has to be supported by the DRIVE and the OS.. [thanks for informing me as i was not aware of this feature ]
but then again a drive without TRIM capability does suffer deterioration i just pulled a random ref. from Google

http://downloads.diskeeper.com/pdf/Optimizing-Solid-State-Storage-with-HyperFast-Technology.pdf -> these guys claim there software makes SSD perform better!

only WIN7 users can benefit from the TRIM command as of now..
its a bye bye for mac users and other previous OSes of Microsoft..

 

Contiuing On With The Original Topic.

Well, what really sparked my curiosity outside of the inherently fast read/write times and technology itself was the fact that using Memory Hungry Libraries, Multis and Instruments in a Pro-Tools session, with the AUDIO from Pro-Tools and SAMPLES from Kontakt on the SAME DRIVE showed no signs of slow-downs, hiccups, stutters and the like. My 16GB SSD is a second generation unit with speeds in the 100 MB/s Read and Write range. I'm just imagining what the newer 250 MB/s units would do.

Pro-Tools enthusiasts recommend having a SEPARATE drive for Audio and a SEPARATE drive for samples. Both coexist on this drive without issue. AMAZING!

 

For 32bit systems, what if Kontakt could read just 8 or 12 of a 24 bit sample and thereby cutting the RAM load in half?

http://www.native-instruments.com/forum/showthread.php?t=97162

 

For Intel and Indilinx Controller based SSD you can also do a manual Trim using a special tool (Intel: SSD Toolbox, Indilinx: Wiper). This works on OS that don't support native Trim like XP.

HyperFast only helps with first gen SSDs that don't utilize write combining. With newer SSDs it actually harms the performance and the SSDs life by performing additional writes.

Personally I would only recommend to use Win7 as OS because it is optimized for SSDs and supports Trim.


Anybody that want to invest the money I can only recommend to read nearly all the SSD related articles of Anandtech, they are detailed and independent.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/

Personally I can only recommend Intel or Indilinx based SSDs.



By the way: With my SSD (Supertalent Ultradrive GX 256GB) I'm using a DFD setting of 6kb preload size with no problems, so loading is really fast.... (Kontakt 4 with Win7 64bit)