How are SSDs for Recording onto now?

Howdy,

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.

Thanks

Jono

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.

Aloha guys,

Just to chime in on this topic.

IMHO
SSD’s seem to be fine for recording (even tho’ some of the 1st Apple ‘fusion drives’ had some probs in this area).

But I have now changed all my ‘spindle’ drives to straight SSD’s (especially in my older machines)
and have had no probs.

Once I even tried a simple 2 track stereo recording to a 64 gig flash drive (USB 2 stick)
and it also worked fine.

Good Luck!
{‘-’}

Unless you are a 24x7 studio, as little as 15GB empty space on your SSDs will give you 100+ years before ANY write exhaustion.

Your SSDs will be obsolete or have failed due to other reasons well before that!

Basically, once you use all SSDs, storage will be off the critical path, leaving CPUs as the most likely performance limiting device.

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!