How big of a difference did an SSD make for you?

[abaga129]

Well I finally talked myself into buying a 128gb SSD after I found out my laptop can support 3 HDs. I've read a lot about SSDs and have wanted to get my hands on one for a long while. Hopefully I will have it soon, but in the meantime I'm curious on the benefits some of you have experienced by running an SSD. I'm mainly interested in how it has affected your DAW. I definitely plan to install reaper on the SSD but should I keep all of my project files on the drive too to get maximum performance. Does everything seem to go much smoother, or is it mainly just insanely fast boot times that you notice?

 

[updog]

Basically, besides the fast boot times, you just lose all the little load times you might have gotten used to while using the OS. When you open something or search something, it mostly will immediately open or display results. It is most satisfactory.

Because of that, it's extremely hard to go back to a normal HDD after using an SSD, which I had to do when I bought my Mac Mini - can't afford to install an SSD into it yet.

 

[JeffTD]

About a week after I put one in my iMac I had to order one for my MBP because the 7200rpm drive was unbearable in comparison. It's just instantly responsive and standard HDDs feel sluggish now.

 

[indecizo]

BIG difference and I only have my OS and just a few programs installed in there. Everything is so much faster now. I recently had to boot an old HDD I have and shit, that thing was so slow. I can't imagine having all the bullshit I have stored into SSD's!

 

[AD Chaos]

The biggest difference for me is guitar sims latency (lack thereof). Going back to an OS in a standard mechanical drive is not day and night, but it is somewhat noticeable.

 

[JeffTD]

You shouldn't get any noticeable change in latency with an SSD vs HDD considering neither are in the signal path at all.

 

[AD Chaos]

Using a plugin there is, for me. I've tested this numerous times, the only variable being the plugin installed on the SSD, vs using mechanical drives.

It's a small number of ms (20 or something, don't remember it now) but noticeable, specially when playing fast riffs.

 

[abaga129]

Would keeping my daw's projects folder on the SSD be beneficial? The way i'm looking at it is that the SSD's ridiculous read speed wouldn't have any trouble loading the wav files and other files used in the project and would free up resources for other tasks, or am i wrong?

 

[indecizo]

If you want your projects to load faster then do it. You'll going to start filling up your ssd space but 128gb is plenty enough. Basically you'll want your most used programs/games installed in your ssd so you don't waste time in those annoying loads. As for the task thing, that's up to your processor and memory not the disk.

 

[Terminus]

Hmmm. So you guys think that a SSD would make games play faster with the increased seek speed? As in better framerates? Been thinking about buying one too.

 

[DeclanWhite]

ssd changed my life. best upgrade EVER haha

 

[meanmrmustad]

I don't like Steven slate drums, can't store anything on them

 

[Spectivum]

SSD works great for OS/programs/projects, with an internal HDD storing other stuff. However I also have an external USB drive connected and whenever that needs to be accessed (e.g. bootup, browsing for files) the wait is so long I lose the SSD speed increase.

 

[Mutant]

Using a plugin there is, for me. I've tested this numerous times, the only variable being the plugin installed on the SSD, vs using mechanical drives.

It's a small number of ms (20 or something, don't remember it now) but noticeable, specially when playing fast riffs.

The only way this would be possible is if your HDD was old and reverted to PIO mode after self-detecting some errors.
PIO mode uses CPU time when accesing the HDD, so if you stream audio while playing the guitar through the sim, it would stutter on you with the latency set too low.

 

[Mutant]

And on SSD vs HDD in games:

A game will usually dynamically load textures and in some cases even meshes which can cause little hiccups in frame rate and/or visible for a split second low quality texture before the high quality texture finishes to load.

So a faster storage device will minimize or even completely solve this problem, but it wont give you increased frame rate once everything is loaded to (V)RAM.

 

[indecizo]

I don't like Steven slate drums, can't store anything on them

Hmmm. So you guys think that a SSD would make games play faster with the increased seek speed? As in better framerates? Been thinking about buying one too.

No increased framerate. Just load 2x faster+kill the annoying hiccups if you happen to get them in your HDD.

 

[indecizo]

Just think of this. An SSD will load faster anything that makes you wait. Much faster. Even connected to a low end modern motherboard. The only catch is that they come with relatively low storing capacity compared to HDD's. You don't need to store all your music, your movies, your pics and your gifs into the SSD, they're going to take all the SSD space and they don't take much time to load on a HDD anyways so no point. So you store all that in a HDD with a lot of space. Ideally you want to install every program you can in SSD's but depending on how much space you're handling, that could take a lot of SSD's and be expensive. Just sayin' for the newbies.

 

[AD Chaos]

The only way this would be possible is if your HDD was old and reverted to PIO mode after self-detecting some errors.
PIO mode uses CPU time when accesing the HDD, so if you stream audio while playing the guitar through the sim, it would stutter on you with the latency set too low.

No. Like I said, I've proven this on various HDDs, all of them 7200 RPM, SATA 3.0 Gb/s. All tests made with same buffer size, sample rates, DAW, same projects, etc.


YMMV I guess.

 

[indecizo]

Would keeping my daw's projects folder on the SSD be beneficial? The way i'm looking at it is that the SSD's ridiculous read speed wouldn't have any trouble loading the wav files and other files used in the project and would free up resources for other tasks, or am i wrong?

If you had everything included the OS installed in an HDD, it'd take lot of resources from the HDD just to load a session with a lot of wav and plugins because the HDD is also handling system files. Now having just the OS in an SSD and DAW+wavs in an HDD would be faster cause you're not stressing the HDD for making the SSD handle the system files and shit. Storing your wavs in SSD would be even faster than that. You could even have all your audio stuff in the system SSD, it can take it.

 

[abaga129]

Sweet, I'll have to see how much space my project files actually uses and see if I have enough space to keep them on the SSD. I'm getting really excited about making the move to the SSD. I'm expecting to see a massive performance boost not only from the SSD but also because I'm going to do a clean install of Windows 7(something I should've done when I first got the damn laptop). Nearly any time I open task manager, I'm shocked at how much CPU and RAM are being used by background processes and half of them are shit that I don't actually need. Plus I just can't get used to Windows 8.