does hard drive cache matter?

looking at a SDD drive and one version comes with 512 mb cache, and the other one with 1 GB cache. Does it make a huge difference on the speed/performance in music production?

No it doesn’t matter for SSDs and music production, by going to SSDs worries about disk performance are over, the big issue was always seek latency due to read/write head movement, SSDs have pretty much zero latency and therefore provide more performance than you’ll ever need for a DAW. There’s no point either running several disks to separate DAW and O/S workload. I only have one large traditional disk in my music PC now and this is purely to back the SDDs up to - nothing “live” runs off my “spinny” disk. I also run a large static (pre-defined) page file on the SSD, on a couple of projects where I use enough memory to page - the project copes fine - I don’t even notice - whereas that would have killed me on my original disk setup.

Thanks. I am not entirely convinced, that running separate disks should not make any difference.

As latency is no longer a problem, pure outright streaming speed is the next bottleneck, a 24bit 96mhz stereo track represents a .5Mb per second stream, so 200 tracks is only about 100mb per second - nothing - a single SSD will sustain much, much higher read/write rates than that and a single SATA channel many times that again. Of course most people have multiple SSDs (me included) not for performance, but because large capacity SSDs are still very expensive.

Not that I don’t believe you :slight_smile: but can anyone else confirm, that dividing tasks between SSDs does not make any sense regarding performance speed? Because that was exactly my plan to get another SSD for splitting tasks, so projects and samples are running from one disk, and windows and cubase from another.

Fair enough, but make you mind up quick coz I’ve spotted your signature says “Seagate” in it - good luck - it’s only a matter of time before it goes pop! If someone gave me a Seagate drive I’d be insulted! Buying one is one step up from suicide. :laughing:

I use the SAMSUNG 950 pro as system SSD. Considering buying the 960 pro this month as second SSD, I use the seagate as a storage backup, and it does its job fine.

Anyone else have some comments regarding dividing jobs on separate SSDs?

It’s still an good idea.
Besides the obvious splitting up the I/o access to not create a bottleneck when streaming audio ,accessing page file, playing samples and hundreds of OS read/writes every few seconds.

Backup is so much easier and faster, a disk image for the OS drive and regular file backup for the other drives.
It is so fast that you actually can find the time to do it without getting annoying.
I do the backups to an internal rust drive that when finished copy’s the files to a NAT that every night backs up to another NAT. (That btw uses seagate HD the old indestructible barracudas)
I can recommend toshiba “rust” drives, they are cost a little more are a tiny bit slower but are just reliable.

SSD’s Samsung or Intel

From a disk/backup management point of view yes multiple disks can make life easier - but is I said before, the demise of latency issues means that a single disk will be more than adequate for DAW applications. Throw in as much i/o as you like, sample loading, audio tracks, paging and you’ll still get nowhere near saturating a single SSD or SATA channel.

Yes from a pure technical viewpoint a single SSD should be more than able to handle it.
I have more of a practical view on this. I would rather buy 4 x 256GB drives than 1 x 1TB drive, both cost, backup management and to be on the safe side. It’s not like there is not room for it in a standard PC.