Anyone using SSD for their primary record drives?

[chrisdee]

I'm not running HD, but I have been using SSD with LE for over a year now.

There are two advantages I notice with SSD's woking in sessions. One is that consolidation works faster.
The other is that plugins and VI's starts much faster.

However, the biggest difference I notice is how fast boot has become. On my system boot is reduced from 90 to 20 seconds.
Starting PT9 takes about 8-10 seconds and opening sessions 4-6 seconds (that's 20-30 session tracks).

I don't know why Avid hasn't yet approved them. They are still expensive so maby it's price related

[IO Composer]

Marsdy and Chrisdee -

Are either of you guys using SSD drives for the drives where you store and work on your projects or are you just using them as your boot/sample drives?

-Jamey

[chrisdee]

Originally Posted by IO Composer

Marsdy and Chrisdee -

Are either of you guys using SSD drives for the drives where you store and work on your projects or are you just using them as your boot/sample drives?

-Jamey

Yes.

I have two SSD drives. One I use as system drive. The other for my Pro Tools sessions + East West Ministry of Rock samples.

[IO Composer]

ok, so I jumped in and installed a 240Gb OWC SSD as my pt project drive. So far so good. Opening sessions is noticeably faster, but other than that, no real noticeable difference from spinning drives. Aside from the fact that they're dead quiet, zero heat, require 75% less energy, and of course, cost 5x as much :)

[Kenmillerjr]

Originally Posted by chrisdee

Yes.

I have two SSD drives. One I use as system drive. The other for my Pro Tools sessions + East West Ministry of Rock samples.

Chris:

Are you running a (what was) LE system or HD? I'm using an HD system with our VENUE and we are usually tracking 48+ tracks at once, and I am wondering if an SSD would be acceptable for our application.

[chrisdee]

Originally Posted by Kenmillerjr

Chris:

Are you running a (what was) LE system or HD? I'm using an HD system with our VENUE and we are usually tracking 48+ tracks at once, and I am wondering if an SSD would be acceptable for our application.

No, I'm not running HD. I'm running Pro Tools 9.
Never tried tracking 48+ tracks simultaniously as I only have a Mbox 2 Pro.

[JFreak]

+48 tracks @96k is piece of cake for spinning drives, so it should be even more so if you spend on SSD storage. You could perhaps ask for 96 tracks even at 192k (4X the performance requirement, compared to 48t@96k and a whopping 8X compared to 48t@48k) -- simply looking at specs, performance-wise this should be a non-issue (completely different story about how many seconds you of 96 tracks at 192k one can fit on an SSD drive...).

SSD is great, I wish every moving mechanical part could be eliminated from a workstation, but CURRENTLY - as already mentioned - the storage manufacturers are openly admitting that the SSD storage can only write as many times to any given transistor, so eventually they will fail. And this will be much sooner than using traditional spinning drives. Once they get this sorted out and stop blaming their own products, then maybe the price (per gigabyte) has also gone down significantly and THEN maybe I'm also really interested.

Good luck for anyone brave/rich enough trying :)

[Emcha_audio]

The biggest draw back of a SSD compared to a HD like a cheetah 15k.7 (15k rpm) let's say, is the slow writing speed. When you are actually recording, the cheetah will be much faster. The cheetah 15k.7 has an external sustain write of up to 190 mb/s (and over depending on the file size) while a Aluratek filemate 256gb SSD that is almost two or three time the price of the cheetah 15k.7 for under than half the storage of the cheetah, will only have a continuous writing speed of up to 130 mb/s.

So yes, the ssd might have a better read speed, but when recording a good amount of tracks, they are not the best choices.

Bassically if using an ssd this is what I would personally do

OS: SSD
VST: SSD
Media drive: Cheetah 15k.7

[IO Composer]

@Emcha - Cheetahs are still very expensive. If you factor in the cost of the SCSI card, it actually comes out to more than the equivalent SSD. Besides, the OWC SSDs have a 3 year warranty. I never expect service out of my hard drives for longer than that. Now, I think you're just making excuses :)

SSD project drive is running amazing. Large sessions open so damn fast, it makes my head spin.

[NewdestinyX]

Wondering if I could restoke the fires of this now year-old thread. This discussion took place in late 2010. Now in early 2012 - would any of you be willing to report any updates on SSD's for project media drives and your experiences now with the newest ones out. Had AVID approved them for media drives yet?

Though I'm sure playing back from them, especially now with ProTools 10 and it Ram Disk Cache, would be no issue - I'm wondering about track count in recording to an SSD? What have you all 'stably' been able to do with track count recording? And then other general reports...