Solid state external drives

[RichrdC]

I'm thinking of upgrading my recording drive and wonder if anyone has had any issues with a particular brand of drive? Is there anything I should stay away from? Thanks

[home_studio]

Nor recommended for multiple write/erase purposes.
It's a great thing as an OS drive, not for media.
Look for more info on the web.

[RichrdC]

So no good on the solid state it seems? I'll do some surfing as you recommend.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by home_studio

Nor recommended for multiple write/erase purposes.
It's a great thing as an OS drive, not for media.
Look for more info on the web.

If only you had a clue what you are talking about.

[home_studio]

http://www.storage-switzerland.com/A...st_Longer.html

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by RichrdC

I'm thinking of upgrading my recording drive and wonder if anyone has had any issues with a particular brand of drive? Is there anything I should stay away from? Thanks

This topic has been written about a huge amount on DUC. You could try searching for those past posts. Many people here, including mission critical professional studios, have been using SSD audio drives for years. Why would you not? They can offer much higher performance and reliability than a HDD... even more so for external/portable use.

Modern SSD drives are ideal for audio applications.

There is too much to cover/explain in general. Why don't you say exactly what your needs are, what computer, OS and interface (SAS, SATA III, Thunderbolt 3, Firewire 800, NVMe/PCIe 3.0, etc.) you have and your budget and ask for recommendations.

There is a huge variety of quality and performance in SSDs. Samsung are the market leader for good reason. Micron/Intel and Sandisk make good stuff as well. But there are also wide ranges in performance across interface types and vendors product ranges. So don't just go by vendor or interface. get specific model recommendations. If you want super fast external drives then the state of the art today are Thunderbolt 3 connected NVMe drives, like this http://www.sonnettech.com/product/fu...lashdrive.html ("Fusion" but not related to Apples crappy drive Fusion technology) but you pay well for those. And "Thunderbolt" or "USB-3" connections with impressive raw bandwidth numbers do not guarantee performance, lots of vendors putting crappy slow SSDs or HDDs onto those connections, you need to know what the actual SSD device performance is that is connecting to that.

[SigFriedChicken]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

If only you had a clue what you are talking about.

This was a bit harsh, but I think Darryl is correct. A few years ago, there was much concern about SSD memory wearing out. This has mostly been debunked as SSDs have been mainstream for several years without the feared epidemic of drives wearing out. You should be fine with an SSD.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by home_studio

http://www.storage-switzerland.com/A...st_Longer.html

If only you had a clue about what you were linking to. Seriously, just stop spreading misinformation.

You are linking to an ancient article on how SSDs work (and from a not great pay to play "analyst" who shills for drive vendors). But so what, techniques mentioned there and more ensure that typical modern SSDs have huge wear lives with warranty limits typically being 3-5 years and many hundreds of TB written (no studio I know of writes near that amount of data to audio drives during a useful drive technology lifecycle). And if you want *great* reporting on consumer SSDs including the best benchmarking go to Anadtech.com.

I've addressed drive cell wear, drive life, TRIM, over provisioning, and other things hundreds of times on DUC. But not just me, many other users of SSDs have posted here. Please go read what real users are doing here with SSDs.

And the warning I'll repeat again, SSDs are great, but *not* for offline backup/archiving. HDDs are likely better there today. Powdered off long-term retention is not what SSDs are designed for, although that is an area that more work is being done in for enterprise cold storage.

[Ticker]

I'm running 4 Samsung 850 Pros, connected via Thunderbolt to a Blackmagic Multidock. Fast, stable, clean. This rocks!

I also have a stack of spinners - Glyph drives - and these are being phased out as I use them less and less.

[home_studio]

I take it back, my bad.