I recently put an SSD into my PC for the OS, plugins & Apps and do love it. I have already decided to go with SSDs for Sample Libraries but I am curious, how do SSDs perform with recording Audio onto? I now a few years back that people were saying that there was a limited number of Read and Writes so weren’t really suitable for a studio with constant use. Has this changed now? I would love to just have SSDs in my machine but equally not up for wasting Money if a mechanical drive is adequate. I currently record onto a 7200 mechanical drive and up until recently it has been no issue. I say up until recently because I am working on something where I am at 316 Channels of Audio and I am having to occasionally wait for the blue meter next to the CPU meter to stop freezing.
The benefits outweigh the possible drawbacks IMHO.
Especially if you record many tracks at a time, or export long mixes faster than realtime as you will see a rather big difference.
But it doesn’t really help if you record/mix 3min pop songs and just record one or a few channels at a time.
It actually is still quite a bit faster but the time is so short so the difference between using a good HD and a SSD will be negligible.
I haven’t really thought about Export times and the speed of Render in Place. I’m guessing an SSD would improve RIP speed? If so, that would be a huge benefit for me! Constantly RIPing VSTis!
I recently added a SSD as a record drive, and I there is not really any difference in speed. But I haven’t measured it and I’m currently mixing on a small 16 track live recording. It may be a different story when there is hundreds of tracks. SSD’s still have a finite number of writes, but it seams they still will outlasts most HD’s.
Yeah, I’m sold. I shall, over time, upgrade so I only use SSDs. I am planning on buying a Mac (and use a PC slave) sometime this year so perhaps I shall look into Thunderbolt drives as well but that’s a different topic!