Maschine on SSD or SSHD?

After about 9 months of not much music making because of workload, moving home, getting married and lots more it's time to get back into music making. During this time I won a Maschine Mk2 which will be replacing my Mk1 Mikro.

I really fancy this being a real fresh start so I plan on re-installing Maschine, all my VSTs (a chance to clean out old crap ones) etc onto my little Lenovo x201. It's a wee beast with 8gb RAM and a 256GB SSD. A the moment all my work and samples sits on an external. I'm really paranoid about losing this one day so would like to keep all work/libraries etc in the one place - on my computer and just use an external for backup purposes.

I was thinking about a 1TB SSD (Solid State Drive) but will have to shell out over £400 for one.
OR
Get a 1TB SSHD (Solid State Hybrid Drive) which will only be around £100. Giving me some spare change to get the £99 2.0 update and some other goodies

I do appreciate how fast an SSD is in terms of startup from having my 250gb but not sure how much more it offers in things like Maschine.

Is anyone using a SSHD? Or switched from SSHD to SSD and can compare speeds?

 

Won't 500GB be enough? (I'm having to upgrade now that my 256 GB SSD is almost full.)

For backup, I use EZ-Gig IV and back up to a regular notebook drive (7200 RPM, 500GB), which clones the SSD. If my SSD fails, I can just swap in the HD until I get a new SSD and transfer the files back again.

 

I would say that you're going to notice a snappier difference if you have all plug-ins and all main softwares on a fast SSD compared to a 7200rpm HD, but it's not so much a crazy difference it's worth all the extra load on the budget.
So i'd say go for the new Samsung 840 Evo ( i own this myself and it's really nice ) for the OS and plug's/other software and a big esata mechanical drive for samples and audio.

 

I agree with demoniqus. I finally ended up spending a LOT of money to build a 21TB Dell MD1000 RAID rack to solve this dilemma for myself.

One thing to be aware of is, external USB hard drives IME transfer at around 20-30mb/sec. If you're also using a USB sound card (eg, Audio10 for me) and a few USB MIDI devices, you'll notice terrible performance playing back samples or tracks from the USB drive. My problems didn't get better until I completely removed the USB HDDs (3 2TB drives) from my system.

I have a Samsung 512gb 840, and the previous 256gb model. An SSD will easily give you 300mb/sec, but they're insanely expensive for any capacity. My combined 720gb of 2 SSDs was being sorely constricted with Windows, Maschine, Traktor, Komplete, a few sample libraries, and a DAW installed.

Also, anecdotally, I've caused both the 512gb and 256gb Samsung SSDs to spontaneously corrupt their contents by unplugging the system during boot-up. If you install Windows on an SSD, make sure you're plugged into a UPS with battery backup, and don't ever just cut power while the PC is running!

I recommend upgrading to a desktop, using whatever SSD size you can afford to install programs to, and using at least two regular old 2TB internal hard drives configured as a mirrored RAID to store all your libraries and samples. External USB drives are the worst possible option. They are slow as dirt once you use more than 50% capacity, and the access times will drag your whole system down eventually.

Switching from an external HDD to an internal one won't make you any safer. A single drive is just as likely to fail, and IME SSDs are even more fragile, due to their inability to recover from a sudden loss of power.

 

question for you ssd users.

is recording music on the maschine the same has recording in a daw? I like the idea of putting all contents of sounds, libraries, and plugins on one ssd. as well as all recordings on the maschine on that same ssd.

im curious if the ssd would fail if it were put to heavy use like that, or is it not heavy at all since maschine is technically a groove production?

 

Hello.
I'm not sure if i read you right but recording to disc should work the same in every DAW, Maschine included.. buffers and other technical stuff might differ but the core functionality should be the same.

So it's no problem at all to use an SSD for all purposes but it's 'very' expensive per MB compared to the "old" mechanical alternative.If your'e using several hundreds of streaming tracks of audio and several thousands of plug-ins on a DAW that's on the brim of extinguishing itself you might notice the SSD doing the job easier.. But seriously i don't see the reason to go all SSD as the only drive(s) in a DAW. ...if you're not on a laptop that is ? Then maybe you get other benefits like extended batterytime due to lower current consumption e.t.c.

But again.. If you got the buck - go for the bang, you won't offend anyone

 

Cheers for the replies.
I'm definitely going to go down the SSD route now. Either 500gb or 1tb.
Both should be more than enough for me.

 

If performance is a big issue for you I would second the suggestion for two drives..os/programs/vsts and projects/samples/audio as proposed by demonique earlier.. this is a standard type of upgrade for folks who use DAWs.

 

I use only a 125 SSD for My OS, Cubase, and Machine. I dont have alot projects and only have like 50gb left but i havent seen many issues with slowing or instability. I do have another 500HDD (not ssd) for storage. But going from HD to SSD was a dream for me. Maschine runs faster then my Yamaha Motif ES! ( and thats hardware)

peace

 

And as we're already into SSD's i will come with a tip for those of you who have been wondering about the OCZ Revodrive's:
They're speedy as hell ( I have the Revodrive x3 240Gb) once they're installed properly but it's true pain in the *seatingequipment* before it's accepting any software on them chips.
Another thing is that Revo's seems to be very sensitive running Windows 8 as in my case Windows update crasched the drive twice in a 2 month period.
That comp is now happy i changed gender on it to live the rest of it's life as a hackintosh.. and it must've been the best ive done this year. Weap you eyes out Bill Gates!

 

thanks for the reply!

ive never used ssd, so im very very curious of how much it helps.

i guess the main thing im concerned about is that fellow music creators have been saying ssd's have to go through write cycles, were has hard drives don't. meaning the more you write on it, the closer it is to being done. which im not really sure if true?

so would constant writing of music from maschine or a daw be heavy to an ssd?

 

their lifespan will almost definitely out live your computers lifespan. yes writes are bad for them, but you can optimize your computer to minimize the damage. keep a backup and buy another, bigger, one in the future.

raid 0 will potentially destroy hdd's faster for a performance boost, so your kind of buying a performance boost out of the box!