HD/G5/SSD question

[The Tasmanian]

I'm contemplating putting a ss drive in my G5 dual 2.5 that runs my HD rig.
Its also time for a new drive - so a ss drive makes sense.

What do you mac nerds think I'll gain with the ss drive in a mix situation?
Only a bit more data read speed because of the bus limitation?
Will I able to run more tracks with the increased disc read speed?
And - are the HD cards processing limiting the speed advantages?

[mylesgm]

Not sure about all the details but I'd put the SSD as your os drive and then use your standard 7200rpm drives for audio. This means any data swap required will be done on the SSD, your programs will load faster, the os will be snappier etc. I currently have an SSD in my macbook as the os drive and a larger 7200rpm as the audio drive and I get quite a lot of tracks running without issues though make certain you are running the latest firmware on the drive as I had a month of glitches before I sorted that out.

[ether]

I've just picked up a new iMac that has a "Fusion Drive" in it, which is an Apple cleverpants idea of fusing an ssd and a traditional hard disk into one (that looks just like one normal drive to the mac).

Though I haven't done any hardcore audio production on this machine yet, it feels incredibly fast. Boots up in a couple of seconds, everything just zips along.

The future is solid state it would appear.

[DarkSky]

Agree with Myles. What he describes is the configuration I'm using in a Nehelem Power Mac here. Booting, the OS and most operations are noticeably snappier (applications load faster, etc) and conventional 7200 rpm drives are more than adequate for sessions and scratch-disk duties.

[Drumstruck]

+ 2 for Myles and Ray.

I've found boot up time with SSD to be about 1/3 that of a spindle HD - faster opening of apps too. And they're quieter.

One caution is the write function on SSDs - I believe that they have a limited number of writes available (many thousands), but there is a numerical limit. Once they reach that numerical then they cease to write to disc.

Another comment on spindle HDs - the larger HDs (2TB +) can sometimes be a little slower due to the "mechanicals", and they also whine a bit more. imo 500GB or 1TB is better for your data storage (though you guys probably have a machine room).

[The Tasmanian]

The question is (I know they boot up fast advantages etc) - but has the ss drives allowed you guys to run bigger sessions in Pootools - more tracks / less spinning wheel of death on maxed out sessions?

I'm running some huge 96k sessions - hoping the ssd will help out

[tony]

Putting a SSD's in my main tracking machine (OS and session drives) noticeably increased the track count I could get to stabaly while recording. It seemed to help a little when reading back for mixing but the obvious differnce was the write speed.

[Drumstruck]

The question is (I know they boot up fast advantages etc) - but has the ss drives allowed you guys to run bigger sessions in Pootools - more tracks / less spinning wheel of death on maxed out sessions?

I'm running some huge 96k sessions - hoping the ssd will help out

Ummm - only 1c worth

The bottleneck between the drive and the buss should be reduced as it moves towards the buss until unity is attained - so you should gain performance advantage in read/write functions.

The processing speed may increase as the machine should be able to push more read/write data through the (reduced) bottleneck.

Can't comment on the CPU power of the HD cards or PT10 RAM disk function.......

In PT9 or earlier your sessions would (mostly) be in RAM (and thus should cause little CPU delay) - though limited to (under) 4GB so read/write speed increase may only provide advantage when loading / saving / closing, and am assuming 8GB RAM or more with 4GB allocated to PT and 4GB allocated to O/S to avoid bottleneck there.

[The Tasmanian]

so 2 x SSD drives would be the fastest way to get the system as fast as poss - plus reading data off a separate audio SS drive would be advantageous for mixing 96k sessions - rather than a 7500 drive for audio?
1 SSD for the system (60-80g)
and a second for audio (240g)
(no pootools 10)

so is the PCI slot the slow link in the chain in a SSD - HD PT9 G5 situation?

[Drumstruck]

Without the specifics of your system and target SSD, I'd say you'll be close to =

e.g.
PCI bus 533 MB/s (64-bit at 66 MHz)
domestic (non-enterprise/stripe/raid) SSD maximum transfer rate about 100 MB/s to 600 MB/s

So two SSDs should give pretty good bang for buck.

I got a 240GB SSD from OWC for pretty good $s but they were SATA - you may need some different ribbon cables / adaptors for yours

[The Tasmanian]

Thanks for that info Ian -
it looks like a good move.
I'm looking into the OWC drives too - 60g SSD for $80 is pretty good - and plenty for a system drive.
..anything to get some more speed/life out of the system at 96k.
at 48k i'll probably see a bigger difference in track handling with the SSD

[Thirteen]

I've just picked up a new iMac that has a "Fusion Drive" in it, which is an Apple cleverpants idea of fusing an ssd and a traditional hard disk into one (that looks just like one normal drive to the mac).

Though I haven't done any hardcore audio production on this machine yet, it feels incredibly fast. Boots up in a couple of seconds, everything just zips along.

The future is solid state it would appear.

Be wary of fusion drives, treat them like a striped RAID, if one drive fails then it is very likely you won't be able to recover data from the other, so good backup protocols are essential.

[Thirteen]

+ 2 for Myles and Ray.

One caution is the write function on SSDs - I believe that they have a limited number of writes available (many thousands), but there is a numerical limit. Once they reach that numerical then they cease to write to disc.

Are you thinking of TRIM? SSD's gradually slow down and need to be "refreshed" periodically with a TRIM application to restore them to full speed performance. PC's handle TRIM better than Macs so far, if your drive supports TRIM then best to enable it for load levelling.

As for the limited number of writes that an SSD cell can endure, time will tell, by the time your SSD wears out you will probably be able to buy one with 5 times the capacity for a third of the cost so it's probably not worth worrying about. The speed advantage is so great and the reliability compared to a mechanical drive is so much better, not to mention the lower heat and power consumption that the trade off is more than worth it.

[mylesgm]

I would be using an SSD and then backing up to a traditional drive array for redundancy. Those 'fusion' drives scare me.

[Drumstruck]

+ 2 for Myles and Ray.

One caution is the write function on SSDs - I believe that they have a limited number of writes available (many thousands), but there is a numerical limit. Once they reach that numerical then they cease to write to disc.

Are you thinking of TRIM? SSD's gradually slow down and need to be "refreshed" periodically with a TRIM application to restore them to full speed performance. PC's handle TRIM better than Macs so far, if your drive supports TRIM then best to enable it for load levelling.

As for the limited number of writes that an SSD cell can endure, time will tell, by the time your SSD wears out you will probably be able to buy one with 5 times the capacity for a third of the cost so it's probably not worth worrying about. The speed advantage is so great and the reliability compared to a mechanical drive is so much better, not to mention the lower heat and power consumption that the trade off is more than worth it.

I hear that the gradual slowdown has been pretty much fixed in the latest generation of SSDs, though there is an initial slowdown after you get your O/S + Apps installed (as expected) - I am talking about the physical write limitation. Agree with pretty much everything else you say - bigger, better, cheaper SSDs are happening, noise red'n, speed, heat, power advantages.

Reliability is another matter - I've had only one domestic spindle drive fail in (ahem) years - but if relied on my studio for livelihood I'd cough up for enterprise quality gear (spindle or SSD).

No matter what medium you choose (I recommend) to not rely on them - prepare a reimage, hold a spare disk onsite and for critical files regular onsite and offsite backups.

[The Tasmanian]

Here I am trying to get the most out of this computer with SS drives,
and realized its 10th birthday is next year!

[Sammas]

I have been running an SSD in my hackintosh for about 6 months now. The speed has decreased, but it still absolutely wallops mechanical drives. Not by a slim amount either. Trim and Garbage collection are two methods of clearing unused segments (deleted data) off the drive. Without it, the deleted data is rewritten into the "empty" spaces between any new data that is being stored. More writes, mean slower speeds and theoretically a shorter drive life span.

TRIM is an OS based procedure. I don't think it was implemented until 10.6.something, but i can tell you for certainty that it is present in 10.7. It is designed only to work with Apple SSD's though. If you put a non-apple SSD into your mac it will show "TRIM Support: no" in the "About this mac" details on your SSD. There are a number of patches out there that enable it pretty easily, but it is to the anger of some hardcore mac fanatics. The rationale being that Apple designed the Trim procedure specifically for the drives they use. Who knows. I am on a hackintosh... and the hack-heads that designed all the lovely apps to get OSx running on a PC were nice enough to include TRIM support.

"Garbage Collection" refers to a TRIM procedure that occurs within the SSD's firmware. Most manufacturers of SSD's have stated that OS based TRIM is the preferred method... though the newer SSD's with sandforce controllers have lead to a new process that theoretically removes the need for OS based TRIM - they reorder current data on every write to keep the speed ticking along nicer. It doesn't get around the potential of shorter drive life though.

After a lot of reading... a lot of experimenting... and a bit of confusion... I just shrugged. Its a $90 device. Buy two, do a fresh install of your OS, music apps and plugins on one, then clone it to the other. I suspect most people here are running a mechanical drive for their sessions, which should be backed up as per Myles suggestion. If your SSD slows down to far or dies, its a 10 minute job to put in the replacement and you will be on your way again.