New Macbook Pro Hard Drive Questions

[Dism]

I still think SSDs are too expensive for storage and streaming. When you have 500GB+ of samples, and more in sessions... You're still going to end up paying several thousand for reliable SSDs. You can buy a 1TB 7200RPM drive for around $120. An SSD would be ten times as much. They're great for system drives, but still too expensive for anything else in a practical sense.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Dism

I still think SSDs are too expensive for storage and streaming. When you have 500GB+ of samples, and more in sessions... You're still going to end up paying several thousand for reliable SSDs. You can buy a 1TB 7200RPM drive for around $120. An SSD would be ten times as much. They're great for system drives, but still too expensive for anything else in a practical sense.

Yep large samples storage library may be the last bastion of rotating disk for users here. Session files can go offline/nearline on slower/cheaper rotating disk.

As with other applications (esp. enterprise storage) this SSD price point concern may be mitigated/inverted when drive consolidation is taken into account. As an interesting data point, Pure Storage has some great products and IMO have done a good marketing job highlighting the performance, cost and reliability advantages of SSD/Flash vs. traditional disk in enterprise class storage.

e.g. Consolidation helps: things may get a lot more competitive with a really fast SSD drive providing everything--boot disk, audio and sample storage. And all that fitting withing laptops with no external cabling/boxes/power supplies (and worth paying some amount more for that convenience). That may need more OS and application optimization. I don't think we are there yet, but that is where I expect things to go with SSD, and that consolidated use starts happening in parallel to SSD densities continuing to rise and prices continuing to fall. One other factor for things like large sample libraries that might be interesting in future is where data compression ends up (esp. beyond the Sandforce type stuff available now), we'll have to see how well/bad that works out.

Darryl

[Dism]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Yep large samples storage library may be the last bastion of rotating disk for users here. Session files can go offline/nearline on slower/cheaper rotating disk.

As with other applications (esp. enterprise storage) this SSD price point concern may be mitigated/inverted when drive consolidation is taken into account. As an interesting data point, Pure Storage has some great products and IMO have done a good marketing job highlighting the performance, cost and reliability advantages of SSD/Flash vs. traditional disk in enterprise class storage.

e.g. Consolidation helps: things may get a lot more competitive with a really fast SSD drive providing everything--boot disk, audio and sample storage. And all that fitting withing laptops with no external cabling/boxes/power supplies (and worth paying some amount more for that convenience). That may need more OS and application optimization. I don't think we are there yet, but that is where I expect things to go with SSD, and that consolidated use starts happening in parallel to SSD densities continuing to rise and prices continuing to fall. One other factor for things like large sample libraries that might be interesting in future is where data compression ends up (esp. beyond the Sandforce type stuff available now), we'll have to see how well/bad that works out.

Darryl

For sure. There's no doubt that SSDs are the future, and will eventually come to replace HDDs in every respect. Especially since, as you said, it's more feasible to multitask from a single SSD, over the use of 2 or 3 platter drives. It really just comes down to price per GB at this point. As prices come down and HDDs become more scarce, we'll eventually see a point where SSDs are the norm.

[abyanf]

In relation to the question, I am wondering whether anyone has any comment regarding the new macbook retina display. I have been wanting to buy it, however the new macbook does not have a firewire port. (i have an M-audio firewire solo ) and also a cd rom. I have heard about the firewire 800 to thunderbolt adapter that apple will release. But I'm still quite not sure, whether to buy the normal macbook or retina display.

[John_Toolbox]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

I'd love to see more reports on actual SSD drive storage here, both for system, sample and audio drives. And I'd like Avid to start qualifying (or disqualifying/highlighting problems) with SSD/Flash drives, especially for me - Apple, OWC and other leading reseller SSD drives, on Macs. SSD drive vendors who want to makers to this space, hopefully you know where you need to put pressure/provide products and technical help...

Darryl

When I bought my 27" imac in 2009, I cracked it open then first day and stuck an intel X-18m 80gb ssd in the optical bay. I have been using this as a boot drive and sample streaming drive for my goto samples since then. I moved my user folder to the internal 1tb spinning disk to minimize clutter on it. It has worked flawlessly for almost 3 years. Also stuck an identical drive in my slave pc which also holds more of my goto samples(the less commonly used stuff still sits on spinning disks.

Really happy with these drives, i paid around $180 each for them back then... Definitely well worth it.