Solid State Drives
- Thread starter kidkage
- Start date
somegeezer
4 Gazillion Rhodium User
Should always have your plugins on a separate drive if possible. and definitely have your recording get sent to its own drive. The reason to not have them all on the same drive is that it then gives the drive mroe jobs to do at the same time. But if you have separate drives, they can all be doing a job at the same time, without worrying about the other drives. Your RAM and CPU should never really be a problem for stuff like that, until you begin to load up a whole ton of VSTs and during your bouncing, but that's a different thing entirely to the hard drives.
As many others have pointed out, you can use a much smaller SSD drive for the OS and spend far less than $1000. I always recommend PC owners have 2 drives anyway, a small fast drive for the OS and programs and a 2nd big drive for data, and for backing up the OS drive too. I'm not using any SSD drives yet but I intend to buy one shortly for a Media Center PC I'm building, and I think 80 or even 60 gigs is more than big enough for the boot drive.
There are numerous PCs from companies like Dell and HP that have room for only one internal hard drive, plus a power supply that can barely handle one drive. So its not that uncommon.
kidkage
Bored of Canada
This is me. HP.
So in a perfect world I think I'd have like, 128 GB SSD for programs, 2TB HDD for libraries, and then another HDD for storage.
I'm curious. If I were to take the HDD out of my current HP desktop and plug it into something like a Mac Pro would it just be a matter of "plug and play"? All my current computer files as well as windows is setup to go? Or is it locked to the current motherboard somehow?
somegeezer
4 Gazillion Rhodium User
It's generally just plug n play. Though you will still need drivers and such for the new hardware if you use it as the OS drive. Any storage drives should be fine without any extras needing to be done though.
Well now you are talking about Apples & Oranges. When you say you have an HP I assume its a Windows machine, and pulling that drive and plugging it into a Macbook Pro is not going to sit well. On many levels.
First and most obvious, Windows is not simply going to boot up on a Mac without some serious tweaking. Enough so that you would want to start with a blank drive and work from there. Most Mac users I know who need to run Windows do it through an emulation product like Parallels.
Using the drive as a data drive may be easier. I'm a 100% Windows guy - I have an old Mac at home but never use it - and last I knew, Macs could read the old PC FAT32 file system but not the newer NTFS file system unless a third-party product was used. This may well have changed by now, I'm sure there are Mac users out there who would know. An OS has to be able to read a File System in order to read a hard drive formatted with that file system.
Even moving a bootable windows drive to another Windows PC usually requires some preparation. Windows pays close attention to what motherboard and what network card is in your system. If they change radically, the system will typically crash on boot up. Even if the system boots, Windows may decide it needs to be "re-activated" and you would need to go through that nonsense. What techs like myself do in these situations is prepare the copy of windows first by using a utility like Sysprep (which comes with windows). Sysyprep lets you "package" your copy of windows and programs and tells Windows to run through its initial setup on your next boot. So you would use Sysprep to prepare Windows, then move the drive (or simply make an image copy of it) to your new system and on first boot-up Windows goes through its setup and adjust to the new hardware.
Sorry if that is too much info, I just wanted to make the point that regardless of whether you are using Windows or Mac, you can't expect to just pull a bootable drive from one system pop it in another different system, and then expect it to work. Its more complicated than that.
Steenamaroo
...
That's sort of where it's at.
For a storage drive :
A modern mac will read and write from and to a fat32 drive.
It will only read from an NTFS drive, but will write to it if you install NTFS3G or something like that.
It's free and stable though. No big deal.
For a boot drive :
RWhite has it sussed. I wouldn't even bother trying anything but boot camp (not virtual) and a fresh install.
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kidkage
Bored of Canada
Not too much info at all.
I was referring to the Mac Pro desktop. Not the Macbook. Trying to put another drive into one of those would introduce a ton of other problems I'm sure!
Yeah, see I figured that with Windows, especially with pre-built machines Windows would be locked to the motherboard of the specific system or something.
However I was aware that Windows is able to run on Macs, so that's where I got a little confused.
Thanks for clearing it up for me!
I built a new computer and put a 90 gig ssd drive in for the operating system. Because everything was new I don't have a real good idea how much the ssd improved the performance but I do know I would not go back to the mechanical drive for the operating system. Everything on this new computer is fast and there is almost no waiting when a program opens. When I use some of the other computers in the house I notice a definite lag in the time it takes to go from click to something happening.
Some of the SSD drives come with software so you can easily transfer your operating system to the new ssd drive.
Some of the SSD drives come with software so you can easily transfer your operating system to the new ssd drive.
kidkage
Bored of Canada
Ok, I think this next bit is the last major question I have:
So, the "O.S, DAW(s), and programs" get installed on the SSD, right?
and
libraries get installed on a separate HDD...
Does that mean all my plug-in products programs and libraries as a whole like Reaktor, Guitar Rig, etc. etc., get installed to the library drive?
Or is there a way for the actual programs (i.e. Maschine) to be installed on the SSD and the libraries (ie. Maschine Library) to be installed on the HDD and that's what I'm supposed to do
It's been a while since I've installed anything so I can't remember if it's possible to install the programs themselves and the libraries separately
So, the "O.S, DAW(s), and programs" get installed on the SSD, right?
and
libraries get installed on a separate HDD...
Does that mean all my plug-in products programs and libraries as a whole like Reaktor, Guitar Rig, etc. etc., get installed to the library drive?
Or is there a way for the actual programs (i.e. Maschine) to be installed on the SSD and the libraries (ie. Maschine Library) to be installed on the HDD and that's what I'm supposed to do
It's been a while since I've installed anything so I can't remember if it's possible to install the programs themselves and the libraries separately
Steenamaroo
...
Some programs won't you let choose where they go but most packages taking up GB after GB will give you the choice.
Half the time I just install to my OS drive, then sort out where I want it later.
That's one of the beauties of mac; You drag one little app icon to a different drive and that's the end of it.
Half the time I just install to my OS drive, then sort out where I want it later.
That's one of the beauties of mac; You drag one little app icon to a different drive and that's the end of it.
One point that hasn't been mentioned is the limited number of "writes" you can do to an SSD, which is what you might call a "hittable" number (as opposed to life cycles far beyond most normal usage).
The situation is improving, but for right now, it's best to think of an SSD as a "read only" storage device. Thus, they are best used as OS drives and for streaming sample libraries. Some VI's read all of their samples into memory when they are first instantiated, while other VI's read the samples from the drive when they are used on a track, or stream them.
But keep an eye on SSD drive specs, as I would expect prices to steadily come down and write cycles to steadily go up fairly quickly...
The situation is improving, but for right now, it's best to think of an SSD as a "read only" storage device. Thus, they are best used as OS drives and for streaming sample libraries. Some VI's read all of their samples into memory when they are first instantiated, while other VI's read the samples from the drive when they are used on a track, or stream them.
But keep an eye on SSD drive specs, as I would expect prices to steadily come down and write cycles to steadily go up fairly quickly...
somegeezer
4 Gazillion Rhodium User
Macs are becoming more and more beautiful every day.
Hmm, limited number of "writes"?
Well, I suspect I'm still at least 6-8 months away from SSD buying anyway. Hopefully they improve even more and come down in price too!
All drives have limited "writes". Don't worry about it. Your entire computer will most likely be old news before any SSD got to that point. Even mechanical drives can last up to 10 years or more.
As for your other question, yes the programmes should go into the OS drive, whilst the sample libraries go into a separate one. Then a 3rd drive for your recorded/mixdown .wavs I actually mixdown my stuff into the same drive my sample libraries are in at the mo though, and hasn't caused me any problems... yet. 3 drive setup is one of the most efficient though.
A few advices;
SSD don't fail they die. The SSD are practically an USB memory on steroids, in some computer forums they advise to change the SSD drive every 18 months.
Summarizing what has been said, I'll have a 100~200 GB SSD for OS and aplications, a couple of 500 GB 7,200~10,000 RPM SATA 2 or 3 for storage.
I'll do an image of the SSD every time I install something new so in case the SSD dies I wont lose a lot of time rebuilding my system.
SSD don't fail they die. The SSD are practically an USB memory on steroids, in some computer forums they advise to change the SSD drive every 18 months.
Summarizing what has been said, I'll have a 100~200 GB SSD for OS and aplications, a couple of 500 GB 7,200~10,000 RPM SATA 2 or 3 for storage.
I'll do an image of the SSD every time I install something new so in case the SSD dies I wont lose a lot of time rebuilding my system.
somegeezer
4 Gazillion Rhodium User
Nonsense.