How About Solid State?

[Sradio]

I see that some of the PC based notebooks are switching to Solid State Hard Drives now. Alienware, Dell, and SONY all seem to be offering this trend now. There is a ton of techy stuff that can be debated about these drives but what I am interested in is this.....

Will Pro Tools LE or HD be able to run off of these new types of drives that are basically just large Flash drives?

[solidwalnut]

I thought I'd resurrect this old thread to stoke the discussion, since the likelihood is that SSD's will be here to stay on the market in the not-too-distant future.

I haven't been seeing much discussion on this (although there probably has been), but I'm sure that Digi has a ton of stuff on their plate other than qualifying these drives for use with PT. But since SSD's are inherently faster in magnitude on all the important categories, why shouldn't PT work just fine with them?

Here's a wiki article on the topic. Not that this article is the be-all info source, but just a resource for anyone who's interested.

[Bob Olhsson]

It's more like mechanical drives are about to go the way of CRT monitors.

[peppertree]

Originally Posted by solidwalnut

But since SSD's are inherently faster in magnitude on all the important categories

storage devices based on NAND Flash memory suffer from write performance that is typically two orders of magnitude slower than read performance

Some kinks to be worked out?

[John_Toolbox]

Believe me, I'm a cutting edge technology freak....

But I don't think SSD's aren't worth it... yet. Why? Figure you'll get at least 2 years out of a conventional hard drive. Right now it's bigger and faster than any SSD on the market. 2 years from now the SSD's will be bigger, faster, and much cheaper.

The only thing I think they'd be worth putting in right now is a laptop that is constantly on the go. But even there, conventional hard drives in roughly abused lappies usually hold up longer than the laptop's battery pack will.

[solidwalnut]

Originally Posted by John_Toolbox

Believe me, I'm a cutting edge technology freak....

But I don't think SSD's aren't worth it... yet. Why? Figure you'll get at least 2 years out of a conventional hard drive. Right now it's bigger and faster than any SSD on the market. 2 years from now the SSD's will be bigger, faster, and much cheaper...

Yup. There'll be a crossover period where using the current mechanicals will make more sense for a few reasons. But it won't be long and the mechanicals will most likely go the way of the 5 1/4" floppy.

But what's more likely for the near-term is that mechanicals will be around for quite some time at a lower price point, and the SSD's will eventually come down to the current mechanical price point. Planned obsolescence and marketing and all of that stuff.

[Craig F]

I don't see SSDs beating mechanicals any time soon in the $/GB formula
A 1 TB mechanical is about $100
A 256 GB SSD is about $700

that's not a gap, that's a chasm

[Shan]

Originally Posted by John_Toolbox

Believe me, I'm a cutting edge technology freak....

But I don't think SSD's aren't worth it... yet. Why? Figure you'll get at least 2 years out of a conventional hard drive. Right now it's bigger and faster than any SSD on the market. 2 years from now the SSD's will be bigger, faster, and much cheaper.

Some of us bleeding edge types have been running Pro Tools all in RAM and just use the HD/SSD as a mirror for any write requests. This pretty much eliminates Disk I/O altogether. The results are pretty stellar by the way.

Shane

[RobPG]

Originally Posted by Shan

Some of us bleeding edge types have been running Pro Tools all in RAM and just use the HD/SSD as a mirror for any write requests. This pretty much eliminates Disk I/O altogether. The results are pretty stellar by the way.

Shane

Sounds fascinating, care to elaborate/post links to how tos?
'

[guitardom]

Originally Posted by solidwalnut

I thought I'd resurrect this old thread to stoke the discussion, since the likelihood is that SSD's will be here to stay on the market in the not-too-distant future.

I haven't been seeing much discussion on this (although there probably has been), but I'm sure that Digi has a ton of stuff on their plate other than qualifying these drives for use with PT. But since SSD's are inherently faster in magnitude on all the important categories, why shouldn't PT work just fine with them?

Here's a wiki article on the topic. Not that this article is the be-all info source, but just a resource for anyone who's interested.

the computer mags i read always some how mention ssd's, and last month (cpu) had an interview with a head of ocz talking about ssd's.

there read and write time is gaining serious improvements. read times up to 270mb/s and write up to 200 mb/s, this is creeping up on the max of the sata II protocol!! of course these are the EXPENSIVE models.

but they said there #1 market right now is netbooks so focus is in that right now. but the next gen of ssd's is ready and should have some pretty crazy specs and be in 3.5" format.

of course price is the biggest factor right now. as moore's law creeps up on them, prices should start to drop.....and i will be waiting