With SSDs becoming mainstream can pro tools now be on the main OS boot drive?

[JFreak]

Disk Cache is still nice, but for many small sessions not necessary any longer

[spinsong]

I was going to try avoiding answering this one, but I decided to chime in on it. With all these system drives glued to the motherboard, they seem to take a beating bad enough. You risk hard drive failure and goodbye to your “old faithful” computer. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Leave it to an external drive to take the wear and tear. Run sessions off an external, and don’t risk an expensive repair on your boot drive.


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[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by spinsong

I was going to try avoiding answering this one, but I decided to chime in on it. With all these system drives glued to the motherboard, they seem to take a beating bad enough. You risk hard drive failure and goodbye to your “old faithful” computer. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Leave it to an external drive to take the wear and tear. Run sessions off an external, and don’t risk an expensive repair on your boot drive.

Proof of this? External drives and cables have caused me way more problems than just about anything else. What problems have you seen running on an infernal NVMe SSD?

Modern NVMe drives are very reliable and the typical most "abuse" they get is overheating which mostly just causes performance to throttle. The typical IO from working with sessions on a boot drive has a very low impact on the SSD. And most users are likely better off putting money into fewer higher performance NVMe SSDs that slower SATA SSD or HDD.

From a simple reliability model the fewer drives and cables and other separate components you have the more reliable the overall system will tend to be.

[spinsong]

Writing operations wear out the cells of ssds . look it up. Boot drives should be left to the os. You can easily toss an external vs a cpu. I guess it depends if you’re using a laptop or a mini, not to count disk space.


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[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by spinsong

Writing operations wear out the cells of ssds . look it up. Boot drives should be left to the os. You can easily toss an external vs a cpu. I guess it depends if you’re using a laptop or a mini, not to count disk space.

I'm pretty familiar with SSD technology. I've got a long background in technology startups in silicon valley, and have provided investors with technical diligence in the SSD area. I helped invest in FusionIO for example, the folks who pioneered PCIe SSD. Also played with multiple companies doing this stuff and NVMe over fabrics and other fun stuff. So yep I'm pretty familiar with NAND cell wear. And again it's just a non-issue for drives used for DAW use.

All my concerns about your advice remain. And what problems have you actually seen doing what this?

[spinsong]

So you’re telling me ssds with consistent read write and os operations on the same drive aren’t more prone to drive failure. I’d rather not take chances with my boot drive especially since it’s glued. The problem is that once the drive fails, it becomes a very difficult fix, now that the components are going towards all in ones. I’m also very familiar with ssds and the circuitry involved. What if someone’s hard drive fails? What do you have to say to them if they have to face an expensive fix? Ssds will and do fail. I’m not trying to jinx it, but it’s a stark reality. I’ve heard countless stories of it.


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[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by spinsong

So you’re telling me ssds with consistent read write and os operations on the same drive aren’t more prone to drive failure. I’d rather not take chances with my boot drive especially since it’s glued.

"Prone to" hell no. I get you see "wear" and are worried by that, seems a bad thing, but it would be better if you had more understanding here before trying to offer advice on others, especially as that goes against how many people here are setting up their system successfully today.

These drives have documented wear performance. And it's so good that concerns about wear, even for low cost consumer drives, are a bit silly.

e.g. The popular 1TB Samsung 970 Evo has a specced wear life of 600TB (TBW).

That is 328GB (DWPD) written daily for the 5 year warrantied life. If that's not enough for anybody... buy a higher spec or larger SSD, and/or ask me about tweak the overprovisioning on those drives to improve wear life (which you should not have to do).

I'm not aware of most folks writing hundreds of GB per day to their DAW session drive.

Worried about reliability of a good SSD vs a HDD?... well hope you are not running a modern Seagate HDD coz I may have very bad news for you.

Again I'd expect any single internal NVMe SSD is a lot less prone to failure on average than a situation with multiple drives, especially with external drives. Simple Bellcore reliability models used throughout this computer industry are based on reducing components/modules to improve reliability, they are stupidly simple but work really well.

[DBK]

I may be taking the term "glued" too literally but what's stopping me from just putting in a new m.2 drive if the system SSD fails? Its just held in by a screw?

Im sure I'm missing something haha.

[spinsong]

I don’t know where you got those numbers, but If I’m not mistaken, there was a study by google and the university of Toronto stating ssds lifetime is 10 years if not less over regular wear and tear. Imagine the rigors of constant read write operations. I’ve also seen multiple posts of people having their ssds failing within months of purchase. The macs have it glued to the motherboard in their laptop. It’s not just held by a screw. Yes you are missing something.


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[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by spinsong

I don’t know where you got those numbers, but If I’m not mistaken, there was a study by google and the university of Toronto stating ssds lifetime is 10 years if not less over regular wear and tear. Imagine the rigors of constant read write operations. I’ve also seen multiple posts of people having their ssds failing within months of purchase. The macs have it glued to the motherboard in their laptop. It’s not just held by a screw. Yes you are missing something.

"heard of".. You've never heard of hard disk failures? Bathtub failure curves of any device? I've heard of people being eaten by bears.... but I think I understand enough of what is going on there to not be worried about being eaten by a bear while working with my computer.

I don't need to "imagine" anything that's what the wear specs actually provide. And they are based on detailed modelling and testing of the drives.

You can Google for SSD drive reliability data just like I did. "10 years" sounds great and maybe make my point for me, but makes little sense to discuss outside of a drive write rate.... it is a wear calculation after all. If you want to discuss this you need to be using standard wear spec numbers like I presented. TBW total bytes written and DWPD daily writes per drive. It's available data, more easily available for higher end drives, and shows that for uses with DAWs should not be an issue.