Looking to replace an ageing Sample Drive

WaveLab
1

Hi, I am re-gurungitating my system after time in a dark green slimy swamp. It’s mostly done, (see sig) but I am considering replacing an aging samples drive.
There is much myth on this subject but the general advice is ‘fast as you can get’ , I cant really contemplate a SSD as the space will need to be about 4tb.

Hybrid drives have a small amount of SSD memory (about 5 gig) which gets to run the cache and within which there is an app to pre-fetch data and put it in the punchy SSD portion, ready for action - after it learns what is being called for. At first they are slow but later - apparently - they get faster.

I know there are hybrids around and I was thinking about these. I know read write speeds are not simple constants, so for music purposes there is probably an ‘optimum’ hybrid.



What are people going for these days… what’s on the drool list?

Z

2

Ah… found this if your interested!

3

Last year I went against my own usual advice and bought a 4tb seagate hybrid drive to keep samples on coz it was a bargain. The first one was dead on arrival, the replacement (next day, shout for Amazon!) started making some very scary noises within two weeks of use so I returned that and got my money back.

Samples by definition are used randomly, so I guess if you used the same samples regularly they’d end up migrating to the flash portion of the disk, would you notice the difference in reality? Hmmm I doubt it. Get something robust and quiet as a sample drive, perhaps a WD red. If sample loading is all the drive is doing I can’t see performance being an issue, if you’re sharing your studio with a noisy drive - that definately is a problem.