Not true! This is entirely dependent on the drives reading speed and the interface’s throughput. To really reap the benefits you need a fast interface (such as those employs by internal drives, for example) and no an external USB2 drive. In this case the USB interface is the bottle-neck that slows things down.
It doesn’t matter if you use a dedicated SSD or a dedicated HDD. Both employ “unimpeded reading”. It’s all about the data transmission rate and, of cause, you’ll see a greater difference between loading 2GB worth of samples from an SSD and HDD, that loading a 2MB .cpr file from the same. That’s simple physics.
Since we are discussing drives here, it is a red herring to discuss limitations beyond them, such as in the intefaces that are NOT an integral part of the drives. Of course, a slower interface like USB2 will mitigate against SSD’s speed advantages, but it applies equally to every type of drive using it.
I was referring to ‘unimpeded’ relative to say mixing, where there may be a significant CPU involvement in the process, as for FX, which may impede timely attention to disk operations, thus masking some of the speed advantages of SSDs, which is what I discussed in an earlier post here.
Still impeded or unimpeded has nothing what so ever to do do with the issue. If you compare an “unimpeded” SSD with an “impeded” HDD, the comparison is worthless. I one could argue that an HDD is must faster than SSD. Which is true, provided the HDD is connected an internal high speed bus and the SSD via USB2. But I hope you agree that such a comparison us utterly worthless.
The same goes for your comparison of “impeded” HDDs with “unimpeded” SDDs! Please, stop comparing Apples with Oranges. Whether the drive is impeded/unimpeded has absolutely nothing to do with the equation!!! Can I be clearer?
If you want to make clear comparisons, stop comparing drives with dissimilar connection situations.
Assume both SSDs and HDDS are on SATA III connections direct on a motherboard, my contention is that speed differences between the two drives are more likely to manifest during loading of a sample template than during mixing with a lot of FX.
The drives themselves are never impeded, but in the latter:
a) the CPU is likely to be less able to immediately tend to idle drives to transfer the next blocks, and
b) there will probably be a lot less disk work (blocks per second) to transfer.
I don’t know. I think most of the readers understand what I’m talking about. But, then there are always some that can’t be swayed by any facts or arguments. These, people usually resort to personal insults, when they realize that they have been proven wrong.
My old PC I had bought Samsung Spinpoint drives. Whilst their read/write head noise was very quiet, those things vibrated like mad, turned my PC case into a giant resonating box, the humming of the 2 drives phasing in and out of each other often annoyed the hell out of me, tried all kinds of tweaks to the case using silicon mounts etc but could never completely get rid of it.
Switched to 100% SSD and…silence… nothing but gentle sound of slow moving 700RPM Noctua case fans which I find soothing.
I use three SSD just for media (programs, samples, etc.) which really does not change that often, meaning sure adding to it and replace here and there, though overall it’s relatively little activity. Everything is backed up daily.
I actually only use one (512 GB) SSD for “active” projects. Meaning, projects currently being worked on. That drive is backed up every day to a secondary project SSD (straight copy for speed and easy “restore”). When projects become inactive, I simply move them off to alternate storage, and complete projects are stored on “permanent” media (CD or DVD). If I need to, I can also move projects to alternate storage to make more room for big active project(s).
My reasoning is simply that if the active drive goes bad, I loose only the difference between today and yesterday. If I’m really productive during a day, I can even run the “backup” after any session. The concept works for me, but I have not actually lost a project drive yet, so we’ll see.
Projects really are mostly writes that hang around for days or weeks. SSDs are going to last for years with that low write rate.
Get a NAS drive to which to mirror. That way it is independent hardware from your computer, but still a file-for-file mirror (yes, I too prefer backups that are simple to get at).
Actually, I have two NAS drives with a spare computer doing an overnight mirroring of the first to the second. Reasonably priced and capable ones, like Synology ones, will do their writes at the high 10s of MBps with the large files used in projects. If one could afford SSDs in them, transfers would be done at the 100+MBps that GbE allows.
I have a Pioneer (the only ones to get) BluRay write drive, and a local chain store had a clearance special on Imation 25GB discs for $1 each, so I bought dozens. That makes for very cheap one-disc storage for our finished projects, as some are over 10GB due to the multiple FHD/50fps video takes that can be up to 800MB each.
I keep raw copies of every original candidate take (both the audio and video), as well as every version of offline edited audio, as one never knows if one may decide to revisit it or raid it for a note to use in an overdub, but mainly because it is a chronological record of the effort, that can be the key to fending off possible copyright suits if someone feels aggrieved for some reason.
That adds up to a lot of storage. When we did our CD 10 years ago, I skimped on buying larger capacity optical drives and ended up taking ages to copy projects to multiple CDRs. Since HDDs and NASs were much more expensive then, I backed up every editing session to optical as well. Learnt the lesson = use optical discs that can hold the whole project = least overhead time + least storage space!
+1 for using all SSD’s. If you can afford it, replace all daily-work drives (system, audio, samples, etc.) with SSD’s and only use regular mechanicals for archive and storage.
I made the plunge on my main rig and 4 VEPro rigs a few years back and my smile has been too big to notice the fleeting pain to my wallet. And SSD’s are so much cheaper now!
Up until recently, SSDs with the sort of capacities required for NASs, like 1TB, have been extremely expensive, though so many are typically required, that even though they are much cheaper now, one really has to think about the outlay.
After having to extract data from a RAID1 NAS disk, due to a NAS box electronics failure, I would only use RAID1, as it only requires one disk for recovery, whereas other RAID topologies require several, and they all need to be able to be mounted onto the PC from which the recovery is being done. However, RAID1 is also the most expensive cost/GB topology.
While we have a secondary NAS box (our older slower one) being used as an overnight mirror of the faster primary, if I were doing the whole setup from scratch, to get full operational redundancy, I would get two high-availability (HA) capable NAS boxes, like the Synology DS713+, and run them each with the same JBOD configuration.