Which MacBook Pro to get for P Tools.

[Craig F]

well I just put one in as a test for a system drive in a new Mac Pro and in side by side the SSD is about twice as fast booting
that's 2 brand new 12 core Mac Pros 1 with SSD system and one with a traditional plater
launching Pro Tools the SSD is only slightly faster

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Craig F

well I just put one in as a test for a system drive in a new Mac Pro and in side by side the SSD is about twice as fast booting
that's 2 brand new 12 core Mac Pros 1 with SSD system and one with a traditional plater
launching Pro Tools the SSD is only slightly faster

Pro Tools can be pretty single threaded/compute bound during startup, along with some I/O heavy activates like reading plugins, but this is also a kind of meaningless test, unless you spend a lot of time each day reastarting Pro Tools.

Its systems boot/startup time that often most impresses new SSD users, but again that's not that interesting in the real world unless you are rebooting a log, in which case you have other problems to deal with. But hey twice as fast at anything is nice.

For Pro Tools users I expect its much more interesting how much better VI samples run off an SSD, or even using an SSD as an audio drive and how many tracks (read and/or write (remember SSD have much more issues writing than reading) it can support. It woudl be great to hear any experiences there.

One issue with Mac Pros is that they have pretty weak/out of date I/O susbsystems And are tying the SSD drives hands being their back by only having SATA II 3 Gbit/s controllers when most modern SSD drives can easily exceed SATA II interconnect performance (its possible to add SATA III 6 Gbit/s PCIe controllers if you have a spare PCIe slot).

Lots of other things depend on the quality/performance of the SSD drive, type of controller it uses etc. Different SSD drive performance can vary widely (more so for writes) so its helpful if you can tell us exactly what drives you are using.

Darryl