ssd's and latency

[southpark]

im looking to cut down on latency on my new hack. iv got my input latency down to 27.64ms and my output lat. to 13.11. im more interested in bringing down the output latency. looking into buying a solid state hard drive and was wondering if they have any effect on latency.
Cheers
Dan

 

[Steenamaroo]

there was a recent thread here where someone explained that audio latency is produced by audio hardware/processors/drivers, but not by ram/cpu/hdd speed.

New hack? If you mean hackintosh, you probably can't talk about that on here.

Latency aside, i'd recommend SSDs to anyone, especially in laptops that have 5400rpm drives.
I noticed a HUGE difference in boot times, program opening times, and just general usage after installing an x25-m in my vostro 1500.
So much so that i bought a pair of vertex 2 ssds for my desktop

 

[dgatwood]

If you're seeing double-digit round-trip latency, you're either using crappy audio hardware or your buffers are set too big in your audio app. Even bog-standard class-compliant USB audio hardware should be sub-10 ms in any modern OS.

 

[TimOBrien]

Hds have ZERO effect on latency.

Latency is the interaction of your OS, the soundcard drivers and soundcard hardware.

I could get 10ms out of my PII-450mhz first daw with an asio Echo Mia card.
Currently run my Motu828mkII at 12ms (could go lower; dont need to).

 

[dgatwood]

Hds have ZERO effect on latency.

Well, that's not precisely true. The latency is a factor of how much buffering occurs in the audio path, but if your hard drive is barely fast enough to handle the track count (not exactly common these days), any playback tracks coming in from the disk will be arriving just soon enough to play back the audio. When combined with a CPU that is already taxed by low-latency audio I/O, that could put you over the edge at a given audio buffer size and force you to use a larger audio buffer size to avoid glitches. Still, it's the use of the larger audio ring buffer that causes the higher latency (even if the speed of the hard drive made you crank that up).