SPINNER vs SSD for D drive

[sw rec]

Used to be we used ssd’s for a system drive, but always defaulted to a 7200-rpm spinner for our sessions. Are we at the point where it’s more advantageous to use, say, a Samsung EVO 870 as a recording drive, or still better off with a standard hdd?

[junkgear]

Definitely better to go SSD. And, if you are going to get one, the EVO is a great pick.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by sw rec

Used to be we used ssd’s for a system drive, but always defaulted to a 7200-rpm spinner for our sessions. Are we at the point where it’s more advantageous to use, say, a Samsung EVO 870 as a recording drive, or still better off with a standard hdd?

I'm not sure who the "we" is here. SSD technology is years beyond where SSDs made more sense for audio drives than HDD. And with NVMe/PCIe SSDs we are also years beyond where it is necessary to dedicate a drive to audio, especially when combined with disk cache, but even without it as well.

There is no such thing as a "Samsung Evo 870". You mean the Samsung 870 QVO SATA drive? If so why are you looking at a SATA SSD when a M.2/NVMe/PCIe SSD is many times faster for the same price ballpark? Your PC motherboard has M.2 slots, use them up, or ir thay are full up put an M.2 adapter card in a PCIe slot. Use a Samsung 970 Evo M.2 drive. It makes little sense to put a slow SATA SSD in a computer that has the ability to take fast M.2 drives.

If your PC boots off an M.2 drive today putting audio sessions and samples all on that single drive will give you better performance than using multiple dedicated slow old clunky HDDs.

[albee1952]

I do NOT recommend the Samsung QVO drives. EVO and PRO are both fine. I agree that there's not much reason to by a spinner these days except for large storage(like the dual WD Red 6TB drives in my NAS).

[sw rec]

Thanks Albee. I’m using a m.2 Samsung as my system drive. The reason I STILL use a dedicated recording drive is, if there’s ever an issue with the OS drive, my sessions are still safe on a separate dedicated drive. When SSDs came into play, the general consensus at the time was that a spinner was more reliable for constant writing/rewriting. Hence my question, the latest round of SSDs are in fact working great for audio drives. And are much quieter.

[Darryl Ramm]

Why do you think a mechanical HDD is more reliable than your boot drive?

The number one thing to worry about with data/session protection is your backup/archive strategy.

“Consensus”? Lots of the options and perceived problems on DUC about SSDs have been painfully misinformed.

[sw rec]

“Concensus:” when we first started using SSDs for system drives, the duc was full of comments that it was safer to still use a spinner for sessions, because the SSDs of that era apparently didn’t do well being written/rewritten to. We’re talking many years ago. Not so much than an HDD is more or less reliable, just more tried & tested AT THE TIME. And it appears that SSDs have gotten immensely better since then. (I do in fact use an m.2 Samsung 970 drive as my system drive.)
I back up my system drive EVERY TIME before I make any changes (today’s debacle beating my head against the wall with 2020.9 reinforced why that’s a good idea!)
But I still subscribe to having my sessions on a dedicated audio drive. An update of any kind that screws things up at least will leave my sessions alone.
The prospect of an m.2 for my session drive is worth a good hard look.

[Darryl Ramm]

And I've spent something like a decade on DUC pointing out that many of those posts you are talking about offering reasons not to use SSDs were not correct.

[sw rec]

I only have one m.2 slot on my Gigabyte Designar mobo, and it already has a Samsung 970 in it, but the prospect of am m.2 in a pci-e slot is intriguing. I’ll be looking into that.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by sw rec

I only have one m.2 slot on my Gigabyte Designar mobo, and it already has a Samsung 970 in it, but the prospect of am m.2 in a pci-e slot is intriguing. I’ll be looking into that.

If you only want to add one more M.2 drive almost any cheap card will do. I'd probalby go with https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-.../dp/B01FU9JS94.

If you want to have multiple drives there are different trade offs with more complex adapter cards.

M.2 cards can get warm... although few DAW uses really write to them hard enough to get really hot. so try to get good airflow over the M.2 card... I'm not sure that many of the simple/cheap heatsink solutions help much but maybe not locate it right next to say a hot GPU,

I'd also think about getting a large enough M.2 card that you could clone your boot drive to it even if you only use it as an audio drive...and maybe clone your audio to the other drive as well nightly. Then you have a way to just reboot and recover if either of the M.2 drives fail or you make a finger mistake (much more likely... #1 reason for data loss).