SSD's any recommendations?

[RTASW]

Hi folks,

I'm running a HD Native Thunderbolt set up as per the spec in my signature below.

At the moment I'm using 2 LaCie 1TB 7200 Little Big Disks via Thunderbolt which are working fine but are really noisy (I have to record vocals in my control room and would like to eliminate the fan noise!)

I really want to move to external SSD's to store samples and to track to.

This is probably a goofy question but are SSD's silent? (they don't spin or have a fan so am I right to assume they make no noise?)

The only real restriction I've got is that the Mac Mini which is in the control room and the MacBook Air (which I use for mobile recording) both only have 1 Thunderbolt Port each so my wish list is either:

2 X SSD's each with 2 Thunderbolt Ports

OR

2 X SSD's and a Thunderbolt Hub

Whichever is the cheaper option!

Can anyone "quote me happy" ??

[chrisdee]

Originally Posted by RTASW

This is probably a goofy question but are SSD's silent? (they don't spin or have a fan so am I right to assume they make no noise?)

Hi

Yes they are dead silent and dont have any moving parts like a spinning disk do.
Another huge benefit is they are way faster than spinning disks.

I reccomend getting one for the system and another for samples.
The one to currently get is the Samsung 840 Pro series.
I have this both at home and at work and they are crazy fast.

I belive the general reccomendations for recording is still spinning disks.
WD Black.

[Craig F]

SSDs do have some bad points:
1) are more expensive per Gig that a good WD Black drive
2) have a limited amount of times they can be written to (about 5 years of daily writing)
3) if they crash the data is usually not retrievable
4) as with regular drives the more junk that is left on them the slower they are

[Darryl Ramm]

Find a Thunderbolt empty Chassis and get some Samsung 840 Pro drives. (The 840 Evo is also an option, but a little too new to recommend. I am still waiting for mine to arrive).

Get a large size drive, the smallest 1-2 or so size drives in any family are often performance crippled, they just do not have enough parallelism across flash chips for maximum performance.

Especially if not needed to be portable. I would look at the Promise J4 enclosure. I have not used it and am not a fan of thunderbolt storage in general but if you need Thunderbolt there us not a lot of choices out there. You can also pull the drives out of the Lacie box and replace them with SSDs. But the noisy fan would still be there. And you need to be aware that any external box with a fan may be noisy. I have not noticed complaints about the J4, nowhere like the Lacie Thunderbolt noise complaints.

See my previous posts on DUC on 840 Pro setup, over provision each SSD by about 20% and make sure to enable TRIM using the third party trim enabler utility and make sure the SSD drive is running the latest firmware.

Darryl

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Craig F

SSDs do have some bad points:
1) are more expensive per Gig that a good WD Black drive
2) have a limited amount of times they can be written to (about 5 years of daily writing)
3) if they crash the data is usually not retrievable
4) as with regular drives the more junk that is left on them the slower they are

SSDs are more expensive per GB than HDD, no argument there, but they are way less expensive per IOPs of performance.

Good SSD drives are significantly more reliable that typical HDDs, especially in mobile/portable applications.

Data may be recoverable from SSDs that are corrupted or fail in some ways, but say many of the the old style pull out platters and stick them in a new drive type extreme recovery techniques used on HDDs don't apply and are not needed since there is no such thing as a head crash, drive motor or actuator arm failures, mechanical stupid things that cause problems with HDDs. Many storage related failures are things like filesystem corruption due to power failure (SSDs are a bit more robust there) or wetware (user) errors... same tools/approaches to fixing those apply to SSD as HDD.

Lifetime is just not a practical issue, current consumer SSDs should last years, way beyond what makes sense worrying about given the current SSD technology/performance/price roadmaps. If you need to toss them out every few years and buy what is then fast/affordable. If performance is not a big issue for you then likely the drive is not getting worn and will last many many years. If performance matters then you pay up and be happy.

BTW we may be within a few years of capacity cost of SSD falling below HDD, certainly if Samsung get their way. That is going to make things interesting.

HDDs are useful for backup/archive. They are the current technology equivalent of magnetic tape or floppy. There is increasing interest in pushing SSDs for long term/dark server storage but that is unlikely to trickle down to consumer markets for many years. Until then HDDs are great for backups.

Darryl

[MindDead]

Originally Posted by RTASW

Hi folks,

I'm running a HD Native Thunderbolt set up as per the spec in my signature below.

At the moment I'm using 2 LaCie 1TB 7200 Little Big Disks via Thunderbolt which are working fine but are really noisy (I have to record vocals in my control room and would like to eliminate the fan noise!)

I really want to move to external SSD's to store samples and to track to.

This is probably a goofy question but are SSD's silent? (they don't spin or have a fan so am I right to assume they make no noise?)

The only real restriction I've got is that the Mac Mini which is in the control room and the MacBook Air (which I use for mobile recording) both only have 1 Thunderbolt Port each so my wish list is either:

2 X SSD's each with 2 Thunderbolt Ports

OR

2 X SSD's and a Thunderbolt Hub

Whichever is the cheaper option!

Can anyone "quote me happy" ??

I did this.

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempossdpro.html x2

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820147190 x4

And it runs perfectly!

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by MindDead

I did this.

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempossdpro.html x2

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820147190 x4

And it runs perfectly!

That's interesting in a current Mac Pro where you have PCIe slots but no SATA III/6Gbps drive connections. In the case of Thunderbolt you are better off just using a Thundebolt chassis that goes direct to SATA III (doing the moral equivalent of that your PCIe card does).

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by RTASW

/snip/

so my wish list is either:

2 X SSD's each with 2 Thunderbolt Ports

OR

2 X SSD's and a Thunderbolt Hub

Whichever is the cheaper option!

Can anyone "quote me happy" ??

I don't get the concern here. You get a multi-drive enclosure like the J4 I already mentioned, or you get single drive enclosures that supports daisy chaining (i.e. has two Thunderbolt ports (as the J4 also does)). You don't need a "Thunderbolt Hub", and you don't want one. What most people think are Thunderbolt hubs are just peripheral expansion docks and don't provide any Thunderbolt port fan-out.

Darryl

[RTASW]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Find a Thunderbolt empty Chassis and get some Samsung 840 Pro drives. (The 840 Evo is also an option, but a little too new to recommend. I am still waiting for mine to arrive).

Get a large size drive, the smallest 1-2 or so size drives in any family are often performance crippled, they just do not have enough parallelism across flash chips for maximum performance.

Especially if not needed to be portable. I would look at the Promise J4 enclosure. I have not used it and am not a fan of thunderbolt storage in general but if you need Thunderbolt there us not a lot of choices out there. You can also pull the drives out of the Lacie box and replace them with SSDs. But the noisy fan would still be there. And you need to be aware that any external box with a fan may be noisy. I have not noticed complaints about the J4, nowhere like the Lacie Thunderbolt noise complaints.

See my previous posts on DUC on 840 Pro setup, over provision each SSD by about 20% and make sure to enable TRIM using the third party trim enabler utility and make sure the SSD drive is running the latest firmware.

Darryl

Do enclosures like the Pegasus J4 have fans? I am keen to move to SSD but the main reason for doing this is that my control room needs to be silent as possible.

Darryl; the main reason I mentioned Thunderbolt Hubs (not that I even know of any yet available) is because I only have one Thunderbolt Port on my Mac Mini and I'm using HD Native ThunderBolt Box. I liked the idea of using LaCie Rugged SSD as they are cheap and wondered if I could get 2 of those and something to give me more Thunderbolt ports as a cheap, quiet solution to my quest?

Any thoughts?

Thanks so far for all the advice fols.

[RTASW]

Originally Posted by MindDead

I did this.

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempossdpro.html x2

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820147190 x4

And it runs perfectly!

Hi thanks for that, did you get the Echo Express? Does it have a fan in. Which model would you recommend? I need to put 2 SSD's in it and it has to have 2 Thunderbolt ports and no fan?

All a bit specific I know, really grateful for your advice.