Audio Hard Drives - SSD or 720's?

[musicman691]

Currently my internal work drives (one for samples & one for sessions) in my cheesegrater are 7200 rpm WD Blacks and my system drive is a Samsung 1TB 850 EVO on a pcie slot adapter. Been looking to upgrade to at least an ssd for the samples using another Samsung on a pcie adapter. The dilemma is do I go to another 850 EVO or the newer 860 EVO which is supposed to have a greater capacity for terabytes written than the 850 EVO by a factor of four for the larger drives. Not so sure I'd need that for samples but for sessions? That's a major reason I haven't gone for an ssd for sessions as they get a lot of writing to them.

Thoughts?

My backups are 7200 rpm spinners in an OWC FW800 enclosure (the one that looks like a mini-cheesegrater). Backups manually done by Carbon Copy Cloner on a weekly basis as a minimum.

[evil_cliff]

Originally Posted by JCBigler

I'm recording and running all of my sessions directly to SSDs these days. I only use the 7200RPM spinning drives for back up any more.

Do you use any sound libraries like Kontakt? I'd love to have all those on an SSD but they are still too expensive, even for 1tb!

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by evil_cliff

Do you use any sound libraries like Kontakt? I'd love to have all those on an SSD but they are still too expensive, even for 1tb!

Define too expensive please?
From Amazon:
Samsung 850 EVO 1 TB $300 US
Samsung 850 EVO 2 TB $660 US

It's not Kontakt itself that's large but the libraries used in it. Stock Kontakt content will easily fit on a 1TB drive and unless you go crazy with the larger orchestral libraries you could fit everything on a 1TB ssd. As always you have to balance affordability versus speed and if you do a lot with samples then an ssd is THE way to go. Even an internal 7200 rpm drive will frustrate you sooner or later.

[Becharax]

This is a never ending discussion ... to make a long story short ... we all did use 7200 RPM drives at some point before the SSDs where released ....

If you are on a budget and cannot afford an SSD, the 7200 will make the cut for you with some minor glitches and slowness ... but if you can buy an SSD it is a definite upgrade

[evil_cliff]

Originally Posted by musicman691

Define too expensive please?
From Amazon:
Samsung 850 EVO 1 TB $300 US
Samsung 850 EVO 2 TB $660 US

3x 2TB SSD + x3 for backups + Enclosure(s). Obviously, you can swap out the backup drive for spinning drives?

I'm thinking to go for this:

https://www.owcdigital.com/products/thunderbay-4-mini