Windows 10 "myths"

ecc83

Well-known member
Couple of things I read recently...

"You really need W10 on an SSD."
Not so according to at least two other PC gurus. SSDs do give a faster boot and will load files such as large samples faster but there is no overriding reason to have one to run W10.

"ASIO audio runs much better on W 8 and especially W10".

Again other experts I trust say "not so". The whole point of ASIO is that it takes audio file handling AWAY from the OS.

I am but a humble bottle jockey so can only go by what I read. The views of the Computer Mighty here will be of great interest.

Dave.
 
SSDs have never impressed me very much at all. In fact, either my edit computer or audio computer has one - and I can't remember which, and certainly I have not got the situation where one is very quick and one is very slow - both start up pretty quickly. The price and capacity of SSDs is still confusing. I'm sure there are reasons why they are out of all proportion to the cost per Mb compared to a complex to build, precision but of kit like a hard drive. I can also dig out my old drives from maybe 20 years ago, and most will spin up and load - will SSDs be able to do this? Not convinced? LED lighting will last 50,000 hours - but we all know they don't.
 
SSDs have never impressed me very much at all. In fact, either my edit computer or audio computer has one - and I can't remember which, and certainly I have not got the situation where one is very quick and one is very slow - both start up pretty quickly. The price and capacity of SSDs is still confusing. I'm sure there are reasons why they are out of all proportion to the cost per Mb compared to a complex to build, precision but of kit like a hard drive. I can also dig out my old drives from maybe 20 years ago, and most will spin up and load - will SSDs be able to do this? Not convinced? LED lighting will last 50,000 hours - but we all know they don't.

I have but one PC with an SSD, a pretty low spec AMD Ath ll that I use in my living room. It does little more than run Radio 3 and host a printer/scanner/ It DOES boot to password PDQ and full op' quickly after that but, the 240G drive is only 1/4 full and I have little on the desktop.

I am typing on a g6, HP i3 lappy 620G spinner nearly 1/2 full and loadsa***t on the desktop (despite my best efforts!) . IF I shut that down then yes, takes a minute or two to get running* but has a lot more to do! Mostly I just shut the lid.

*Never understood why peeps are so pissoffable about boot times? Just put the smeggin' kettle on!

Dave.
 
I've gotta say that if you didn't notice a difference in boot times with an SSD, then either it was not a very good SSD or it was using an older bus type that couldn't handle the bandwidth. Mine made an instant, massive difference. My newer NVMe m.2 is even faster, great little chip.
 
I've gotta say that if you didn't notice a difference in boot times with an SSD, then either it was not a very good SSD or it was using an older bus type that couldn't handle the bandwidth. Mine made an instant, massive difference. My newer NVMe m.2 is even faster, great little chip.

Agreed.
I don't know what amazing spinning drives or awful SSDs some people are testing by my experience has been bicycle vs car.
Even in a massively underpowered netbook I've seen SSDs make the difference between usable and torturous.

I'm not concerned with boot times in the slightest but my experience has been such that I genuinely wouldn't use spinning disks even if someone gave me a free lifetime supply.
As an external backup on a shelf? Sure, but not in an active system

Your gurus are right in that no one *needs* an SSD but the way hardware is these days, that's often where the bottle neck is.
 
I really don't get it - disk speed hasn't;t been an issue for years - HD video, huge samplers for audio - throughput hasn't caused me any glitches with drives for quite a while. My edit machine has windows on the SSD, and the difference between this and the audio computer is not huge - AND - the edit machine start up time with the SSD isn't that speedy really. The macbook is pretty quick compared to the two windows machines.
 
If you're not seeing much difference I guess either your demands aren't that great, or you're on SataI, or the SSD isn't great.
 
The computer I am typing on now is about 14+years old. I don't do much on it these days, maybe little photo editing, experiment with stuff.

It was painfully slow at loading stuff up. Browser, apps, just was killing me it was so slow. I was thinking of tossing it and getting a laptop and keep truckin', then I put an SSD in my music computer for faster loading of files as I was noticing my HD light overload would come on every now and then. Anyway, it made a difference in my music computer and in this old thing. I am an SSD fanboy now!

I don't mind putting the kettle on when I want to drink tea, but I don't like waiting for it to boil either ;) That is why I have a timer on my coffee pot, ready when I get up!
 
How about just another means to drive down noise from a DAW?
Standard set here is 'C, and two active audio drives. (primary plus 'daily back up.

I've got to the point I don't want to even hear the thing. :)
 
So, if I could pull this together?
1)There are good and bad SSDs. Did not know that. Is my Samsung CT 240 BX2* one of the good guys?

2)An SSD should show a faster boot time but unless you are REALLY pushing things (most of us are not) you won't see a massive change in the day to day running of the PC? That is my experience.

3)Windows 10 is a red fish in this context?

The claim that W10 "handles ASIO audio better" has not been mentioned but I tend to go with "ASIO bypasses OS" anyway (mac users need not apply!)

*I looked for the drive model using Speccy. Did not give it, just reported "Storage" must see if there is an update...CAREFULLY!

Dave.
 
I run all Western Digital VelociRaptor enterprise disk drives in my DAW....I've never seen the drive bus get even close to half-full loading or recording multiple tracks, which I can monitor from the DAW.
I can play back multiple tracks while simultaneously recording multiple tracks...and the drives don't even break a sweat.
I run 4 of them in the DAW...1 for OS/Programs, 1 for sample libraries and 2 for project folders, each partitioned in two, and have them setup as Work1/Backup2 and Work2/Backup1. Plus I have 2-3 more, brand new ones for future use.

AFA getting faster boot times with SSD....like who really cares.
Once the system boots, it's mostly residing in RAM anyway, so not much extra benefit from the SSD.
I mean, is there some pressing need to boot super fast? :D
With the Raptors I can boot in about 15-20 seconds...that's fast enough. I usually have something else to get setup anyway while the DAW boots.

AFA file transfers...unless you're transferring to/from SSD drives, the slower drive will dictate the speed...so when making backups to external drives, if they are not SSD, the speed thing is not so evident.

Now I don't know how many tracks some of you guys are loading/recording all the time...but if you were having problems off a spinning disk, they were probably lousy drives.
Before the VelociRaptor drives in my current system...I always ran SCSI drives in my previous DAW boxes.

AFA Win 10...ask me again in about 5 years, though by then it will probably be Windows 11 or 12...but for now, it's Win 7 for the win! :p
Maybe at that point I will be on SSD drives. ;)
 
"Once the system boots, it's mostly residing in RAM anyway, so not much extra benefit from the SSD."

This is what I have been told several times by a man in a mag whose PC expertise I have learned to trust completely over the last 10 years.
As a 'simple electronics soul' I can see the logic here. SSD zaps stuff into ram PDQ giving the fast boot. OS and other proggs then run MOSTLY from ram and if the latter is big enough AND gets topped up often enough from (any?) hard drive, the ram will define system speed?

Now of course, IF what you are doing requires massive amounts of data to be constantly chugged in and out of ram a faster source for said data will keep things slick. But it seems, most of us, most of the time do not hit the "HDD>ram" bottleneck.

As for "old, slow computers"? About 3 years ago I bought a grandson a refurbed Lenovo 'Think pad'. Very neat, very swift little laptop when 'I' got it!

A year or so ago I asked his mum how it was doing? "Pretty rubbish" was the response. "He can hardly use it now". Long.short. I had it back for a weekend and even THIS PC numpty could see it was clogged with shit! Got it PDGood again, no SSD needed!

Dave.
 
So, if I could pull this together?
1)There are good and bad SSDs. Did not know that. Is my Samsung CT 240 BX2* one of the good guys?

Sort of. There are different generations of the technology. Drives usually advertise max sustained R/W, and benchmarks/comparison are readily available.
I suppose it's a bit like saying an i3 will be faster than a core2duo. There will be rare exceptions where this isn't the case, because all i3s/core2duos aren't equal.
You can also bottleneck a drive by using sataI/II or external bus.
I do have one connected to a SataII bus, for example. In that case the bus limits the drive to around 240 each way.

My first SSD claimed sustained read write of around 200/80, irrc, whereas my current ones are more like 500 each way.
The one in my laptop weighs in at 1000/1300. (PCI-E).

Your drive seems decent, and worthy of SataIII connection, if you have one.


2)An SSD should show a faster boot time but unless you are REALLY pushing things (most of us are not) you won't see a massive change in the day to day running of the PC? That is my experience.
If you don't transfer big files, whether directly or behind the scenes in some software, you're not going to see a huge benefit of sustained increased speeds.
Technically anything read from the drive is going to be snappier but, of course, you'll not notice on a task that would have taken half a second anyway.

Defragging would be substantially faster although you don't need to do that with SSD. :p
Virus scans, file searches, backups etc should all be a lot faster

I'm not sure it's fair to say 'most of us are not'.
Most of us probably open large audio sessions, use large sample libraries, move big folders of pictures and videos around, virus scan, search for files, take backups etc.
It's great saying some of things things load the data into memory, but from where? ;)
That said, if someone has a secondary computer for day-to-day and all it does is light browsing, that's a bit different.

3)Windows 10 is a red fish in this context?
Pretty much.
I'd say any modern OS could benefit from SSD over spinning HDD but none of them needs it.
 
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Ok Mr S! I can see that this is one of those cases where making generalizations is poor advice.

Bit like "Bike and Car"? Which will get you through a major city faster? Which do you choose city TO city! A Harley does it best of all! Bloody cold mind!

Dave.
 
True enough.
It's one of the really common questions with SSDs. I bought X speed super dooper drive and it only runs at 1/2X,
then the user finds out he's running it on a sataII bus and only seeing half of its potential.

Getting less and less common, of course, but still happens.
 
SSD's are quiet!

I thought nobody heard me
:>) I don't actually have a handle on how much noise three or four drives actually contribute compared to the fans and such? I do know my second very nice Jim Roseberry's Studio Cat' rig is pretty quiet ('Cool Master V8 on the cpu etc). Looking into taking it further next go 'round.
Found this a while back looking into it. All be it maybe going even further than needed was interesting..
Serenity Professional - Using Quadro GPUs, optimized for CAD, Post-Production, Photoshop
 
I thought nobody heard me
:>) I don't actually have a handle on how much noise three or four drives actually contribute compared to the fans and such? I do know my second very nice Jim Roseberry's Studio Cat' rig is pretty quiet ('Cool Master V8 on the cpu etc). Looking into taking it further next go 'round.
Found this a while back looking into it. All be it maybe going even further than needed was interesting..
Serenity Professional - Using Quadro GPUs, optimized for CAD, Post-Production, Photoshop

Yes, SSD are silent, no question but I can honestly say I have not had much trouble from noisy hard drives. Droning fans for sure and I have a CPU fan atop an AMD 6 core Black that produces a constant, irritating whine which I would like to fix. Can anyone point me to a source of quieter CPU fans? UK of course.

I did have a 'clicky' hard drive some years ago but that was on its last legs.

Dave.
 
Yes, SSD are silent, no question but I can honestly say I have not had much trouble from noisy hard drives. Droning fans for sure and I have a CPU fan atop an AMD 6 core Black that produces a constant, irritating whine which I would like to fix. Can anyone point me to a source of quieter CPU fans? UK of course.

I did have a 'clicky' hard drive some years ago but that was on its last legs.

Dave.

I think that Noctua fans are the quietest and most effective around. But really most fans nowadays are pretty quiet. The important thing for quiet fan operation is to get PWM fans (4-pin connectors, rather than 3-pin connectors) and connected to the appropriate fan headers on the motherboard so that they can be controlled via software and set to a nice, quiet curve. That way they're either idle or slow when things are cool, and they can ramp up RPMs when things heat up under load.
 
I think that Noctua fans are the quietest and most effective around. But really most fans nowadays are pretty quiet. The important thing for quiet fan operation is to get PWM fans (4-pin connectors, rather than 3-pin connectors) and connected to the appropriate fan headers on the motherboard so that they can be controlled via software and set to a nice, quiet curve. That way they're either idle or slow when things are cool, and they can ramp up RPMs when things heat up under load.

Ooo! Pricey! I don't want to appear ungrateful or cheap mate but this fan is clearly faulty (in fact if you turn the machine on its side it shuts up) because it sings at about 800Hz and 'I' can hear it two mtrs away! No desktop I have had or been near is that whiney. Pretty sure a bog S jobbie at 15 quidish will be loads better? I just need to make sure of getting the right one. Do they usually come with the white jollop?

Dave.
 
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