Worth The Wait

[garyb]

nice.

[valis]

Waddup Valis...

You know I just don't see the advantage of using SSD's except for a real snappy and smooth experience with the apps and OS.
I have tried to see the advantages and in all honesty I can't use more than the current transfer rates of 85-100MB's per second.
I am sure some folks with huge 64bit templates can dream up a scenario, but I have watched my friend go through the Intel G2 and yes, its nice to be able to use the entire area of storage and not have to span over HDD's but that is the only advantage I see.
My DAW's are snappy as a Sea Turtle using the 90 dollar Kingstons, and I am going to upgrade but only because I need more room for samples.
I have turned the 360G's and 740G's into hot spares and have 2 x 150's in each 4U.
But maybe I might go w/ a single big drive when my 1U is ready for stage.
Check the random transfer rates and sustained rates on this beast.....

http://www.storagereview.com/western_di ... tor_review

Yes indeed the new velociraptors look tasty. 600GB in a drive that speed?!

I'll be honest with you, the only thing I want an SSD for anytime soon is for a gaming partition. I only have time to game a few hours here & there and waiting several minutes to load content could be reduced to a few seconds (similar to those who want huge voicecounts) but even for OS/apps I'm still holding off. So just not worth the cost for me still since my gaming habits aren't something I'm willing to drop $300-600 on for just 30-90 seconds savings in time.

Color me unsurprised that you don't feel the need for SSD's for rompler voicecounts, especially with the limited storage space at those costs (imo it's more important to play the RIGHT notes than as many notes as possible.)

I realize for OS/apps use that applications might open a few seconds faster, but even with the seek times & straight-line *speed* of SSD's the bottleneck for an OS/apps drive is still the SATA *controller logic* (even with NCQ the SATA controllers are relatively stupid and bottlenecked for workstation/multithreaded usage patterns when compared to SCSI/etc.) I've been able to choke off the SSD machines I use by doing multiple things at once just as easy as with a magnetic drive (spinlocking processes waiting on drive access) and to be honest this is still my biggest issue with my current 1-2 year old SATA drives (since I never put SAS in this box.) Of course SSD's tend to recover faster as well in this situation but there's room for improvement still, especially at those costs.

[valis]

Intel Begins to Ship 25nm Flash Memory.

So by this winter we should see significant drops in SSD prices again, since Intel's last shrink (to 34nm) dropped prices by 60%. Currently it's only the 30-40GB models hovering in the $100-150 range, I bet we'll get 80GB-120GB models close to that when all the NAND makers are shipping "in the 20nm range" (that's Samsung's wording since they'll only have 27nm.) And if the Intel X-25M G3 is available in 300 & 600GB sizes for half the current prices...maybe it's time! (for me)

[siriusbliss]

Intel Begins to Ship 25nm Flash Memory.

So by this winter we should see significant drops in SSD prices again, since Intel's last shrink (to 34nm) dropped prices by 60%. Currently it's only the 30-40GB models hovering in the $100-150 range, I bet we'll get 80GB-120GB models close to that when all the NAND makers are shipping "in the 20nm range" (that's Samsung's wording since they'll only have 27nm.) And if the Intel X-25M G3 is available in 300 & 600GB sizes for half the current prices...maybe it's time! (for me)

Geez, pretty soon we'll have 20Tb nano-tube arrays on a keychain.

Greg

[valis]

NAND Flash Memory to Cost $1 per Gigabyte in Near Future - Analysts.

^^ What I've been waiting for since we started this thead...

[valis]

OCZ'z Vertex Pro 3 Demo: World's First SandForce SF-2000

Think we're past the performance curve point now it's just about price. Above Vertex Pro 3 has some decent sequential read/write numbers (as in excellent) but that's not the real test, check the 4k random iops...finally something that beats HD's on grounds more than just seek time (since SSD's don't have heads to seek they win there always.) Now we just need Intel to get into the game and Samsung to get that latest controller on the market so we can get the prices down for the higher capacities (which is where the peak performance is.)

[valis]

Officially past the point in the performance curve where there's no turning back, still waiting on prices a bit:

new line of solid-state drives (SSDs) on Monday that are based on the serial ATA (SATA) 3.0 specification

OCZ Vertex 3 Preview: Faster and Cheaper than the Vertex 3 Pro

[Neutron]

i was given a OCZ 50GB revodrive. I am using it on a machine which is just doing folding@home at the moment, but will be running my projector(games and movies, and displaying circuits BIG for when im building stuff). holy hell it is fast. most of my other machines are using SSD for boot drives and my studio machine has a separate one for "maschine" samples (so it loads like hardware) but the revodrive is in a class by itself, even compared to the SSDs

being on the PCI-e bus even if it is done in a sort of fake way, still works very well. I have it on one of the slots which is directly on the CPU, so its bypassing a lot of chipstuff. (its a sandy bridge, good thing i decided to put it in there, since the SATA ports will die)

[astroman]

fwiw - I can add a 100 Gig RevoDrive X2 to the list... and wasn't impressed at all
well, that's a bit of an understatement, the device isn't lame - but surely didn't live up to what it was announced to me by my local dealer.
I have a stupid program routine that's reads the size of a picture from the respective file position, so it opens the file, reads 2 positions, closes it and then goes to the next.

Applied it to a list of (say) 5k pics. WD green disk flashing like hell and some head noise indicates action. As this wasn't intended as a benchmark I didn't look at the clock, but at least 30 to 60 seconds passed.

Now the Revo X2 on another machine with an identical copy of the stuff.
Say 1,2,3 - bingo - less than 4 seconds. Now you go: woooow, that's cool

Back to box one with the lame WD (which is absolutely great, because it is VERY quiet and cool)
Yes, now you could count 1,2,3,4 here, too.
Of course... the sh*t is still in the cache...

So whenever you'll have chunks that happen to be read in a reapting pattern, the supa-dupa-drive will be a waste.
It can do it's magic only on huge amounts of random data.

I'm pretty sure there's not much benefit with long, continuous reads either, as in big sample libs.
When I open a 150 MB file in SAW Studio on my CoreDuo E7200 that's no more than 2 blinks of an eye.
I'll just time the difference later (as this got me curious now myself...)
Anyway - SAW is fairly straight forward.
If your program does a lot of disk IO with positioning you may notice more of a difference.

But I seriously doubt that any DAW program is capable to generate a workload that get's this drive into the io region it's famous for.
Any 'regular' flash drive of similiar specs (regarding the chips) will do as well.
The Revo X2 has a severe pricetag of 360 Euro per 100GB.

cheers, Tom

[valis]

I don't actually have any real complaints about Win7 or OSX 10.6.7 for audio usage (daw, dj, ableton, whatever) with my current drive setup, not an SSD in sight. Part of that is the fact that 64bit use is going well in Logic and Reaper (Live doesn't need it yet for me) and NI got their act together with their 64bit releases as well. Disabling the memory server improved Kontakt's performance immeasurably, and Battery works great now with Multithreading disabled if you use multiple instances. OSX has only 80GB in use but a lot of it is due to the Logic content, Live's content and having quite a few audio apps installed in general so I could pare that down and move it to other drives if I wanted an SSD there. However all an SSD would do for my OSX audio work would be to reduce a few momentary pauses that I experience on loading things.

I do however hit walls with video and graphics work and 3d. Initial app load would be sped up quite a bit by an SSD, both for my 3d apps and all of the Adobe crap I use (I love PS & AI and despise AE & Premiere which I'm using a lot of lately due to native gpu support for my canon 60D's video footage.) In fact with CS5, Softimage and just basic audio apps installed on Win7 (no major sample library content for Reaper or Live here) I'm pushing 110GB, which means even the OCZ Vertex 3 & Intel 320 160GB drive ($250-280) is full enough if I bought one today that I'd have to consider something larger or consider moving some of the datastores for Windows to other drives (user folder content & etc)(. Throw in the fact that I like to have 2-3 games installed at minimum (in Win7) and the 200GB+ SSD's are just still too costly for the gains I'd see (sadly.) A smaller SSD used for video projects and swap space when rendering or using PS/AI may be in the cards though, some of the large print jobs and video jobs I've done lately are getting slower & slower.

[astroman]

so here's a small mixdown benchmark of a 12 minute file, 7 tracks, only the mid part fully crowded
lots of clips, some are excerpts from > 50 MB files (in case that matters)

CoreDuo 7200 2,53 GHZ disk WD7500AADS: 57sec
i7 3,3 GHZ with RevoDrive X2: 17sec performs 3,4 times faster

considering the WD is a so called 'green drive' not optimized for performance that's a fairly low score for the Revo X2
...like a Ferrari inner city blues...
with a different task (as Valis mentions) it certainly can perform much more impressive.

cheers, Tom

[dawman]

The real benefit for sample users is the ability to load more into RAM. I can take these cheezy poorly timed crescendos in Kontakt, and now store them in RAM and use the Mod Wheel to control their duration.
So more benefits are being realized, but these benchmarks we are being fed are the usual spiel that don't play well in real world use.
But having said that it is the random read rates using a Que Depth of 8-12 that seem to reflect our needs for streaming.
Most tests are using a QD of 1-3, and the ones that show a QD of 32 have to be typo's.
Random notes on a keyboard relate to random reads, polyphony relates to Que Depth, so keep these parameters in mind instead of the 550MBps that make gamers sell clothes to buy one.

[valis]

Yes excellent point for audio users, queue depth & database benchmarks also correspond somewhat to some of my graphics work, as I would use the drive for temporary scratch & windows swap. Video is a bit different in that the queue depth is much smaller but the sequential reads & writes are what really make a difference. Both of these have suffered as SAS's cost has far outstripped its gains, but the higher queue depth that SCSI/SAS allowed (without the 'hitching' of SATA/PATA) is sorely missed here.

But I do look forward to spending closer to $200 than $600 to get to the $1/GB pricepoint, Until then for audio users you can speed up your OS/app loads, improve your sample library load times a bit and target applications where vibration are a concern. Otherwise SSDs are just a luxury that's far from necessary... Also while I realize most Scope users are on Windows, it's worth noting that OSX has limited TRIM support for Apple sold drives right now and 10.7 should support off the shelf brands as well.