External drives. SSD HHD?solid opinions needed

Hi there I'm having trouble trying to find some solid opinions regarding external hard drives.

I'm looking at buying La Cie Rugged thunderbolt for all my current audio files and samples.

Are the higher speeds that SSD offers worth the extra expense?

Here they say thunderbolt is 12X faster than firewire:

http://www.which.co.uk/technology/computing/guides/thunderbolt-and-usb-3-0 -explained/

Here they say Firewire 800 is equal to approximately 800 Mb/s (megabits per second), since there are 8 bits in a byte, then this would be 100 MB/s (megabytes per second).

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=690158

Here they say The LaCie Rugged SSD offers up transfer rates as high as 380MB/sec and the HDD variants claim up to 110MB/sec.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/25/lacie-rugged-usb-3-thunderbolt-drive-pricing-ship-details/

So does that mean HHD thunderbolt drives are hardly any faster than firewire? an extra 10 MB?? if so is this because the disc can only spin so fast?

A Lacie rugged 1TB HHD is £140 while a 256 GB SSD drive is £236.

I thought The HHD look pretty fast already until i started researching. Now I don't know my thunderbolt from my ass.

I've had plenty of "disc is to slow" error messages so i'm leaning towards an SSD. Have anyone had any experience using one? If so, was there a significant increase in performance? Right now i'm just using the internal drive on my macbook pro for everything. so will I get an increased performance with either?

Cheers and kind regards

-Matt

I originally didn't answer this because I was hoping some people with first hand SSD experience would answer.

I don't have first hand experience using SSDs with Logic (yet). However I do know that they are now ready and much faster than HDDs, so if you can afford one, by all means go for it. I know at least one top hollywood film composer who uses them exclusively and swears by them.

However you're mostly looking at the wrong numbers. Much like someone buying a car to drive in the city comparing the biggest number they see on the odometer: one car says 170mph, the other 190mph, and another 200mph: which car is the best? Neither, who cares what the odometer says, AND on top of that, who cares how fast the car can go. You need a car that's light, that can accelerate pretty easily, that doesn't cost an arm and a leg on gas, etc... so you're looking at the wrong numbers.

Open one of your most disc-intensive projects and press play. Look at the HD meter: you will not see the meter go up to a certain level and stay at that level throughout the project (which would indicate the HD is working continuously), you see the meter go all the way up at the beginning of the project (as the HD is locating the files and transferring some of the data), then go all the way back down (as the HD is no longer working and is waiting for the next operation), then go up to a certain level for a short time (the HD needs to locate the next pieces of data needed to continue playing the tracks), then back down, etc...

In typical music production you rarely (almost never) need to sustain a transfer from the drive to the computer or from the computer to the drive. So the transfer rate is always high enough and is not the bottleneck. On the other hand, you need to quickly locate a lot of small audio files at various locations on the drive and then transfer them. So how quickly the drive can locate a file is more important to you than how quickly it can transfer them.

Now for HDDs this was known as the seek time, but on an SSD the seek time is soooo short that you don't really need to worry about it.

So does that mean HHD thunderbolt drives are hardly any faster than firewire? an extra 10 MB?? if so is this because the disc can only spin so fast?

Yes: thunderbolt, firewire, usb, those are the interfaces you're using. The disc inside the box is the same SATA drive. For most operations your bottleneck is the drive, not the interface.

Right now i'm just using the internal drive on my macbook pro for everything. so will I get an increased performance with either?

Yes, chances are you will, but if you don't need a lot of space on the HD I would consider the SSD which will perform faster independently of any numbers you read on the papers. Don't worry so much about numbers. Just like you don't select the best speaker monitors for your studio by looking at a diagram of their frequency response (I hope), you don't buy a HD based on its max transfer rate - or worse, based on the max transfer rate of the interface of that HD.

Hope that helped a bit?

sound advice ...loads of help...a lot of the time my HD meter is all the way up the whole time. I'm leaning towards the SSD and an HHD for back ups.

Thank you

-M

a lot of the time my HD meter is all the way up the whole time.

Really? But do you see it move a bit up and down, or does it seem to stay stuck in one position? You can couble-click the HD meter in your transport bar to get a pop-up Disk I/O meter that's a bit more accurate. Do you have a lot of small regions on all your tracks? Or do you have looooong audio regions on every track?

I'm leaning towards the SSD and an HHD for back ups.

That makes a lot of sense.

Sorry it's my cpu meter that's up at the top. my HD meter will spike but then move up and down near the bottom.

-M

I recently had to move out of my studio and resurrected my 2007/8 Macbook (core2duo, slow!) for audio duties. I replaced the slow HDD with a SSD and the improvement in track counts and sampler instruments has been vast. So I can definitely vouch for the benefit of SSD for something like audio where frequent spikes in disk access for streaming or samples are needed.

However the drawback of solid state drives is the relative cost compared to traditional drives.

One solution is to have your system and logic installs on the SSD and then a second drive (I don't think the interface should matter too much - they all have ample data rates) for your sample library and audio. I would advocate having a third drive as a backup for both of the others.

The best possible solution (I think) is to have a 2 disk setup INSIDE your MBP. You achieve this by sacrificing your optical drive (you can put it in an external enclosure) and replacing it with a second drive. That way you can take advantage of the speed of a SSD and the capacity of a traditional hard drive. You can also use your existing HDD as the second drive, saving money, although a 7200RPM drive would be preferable to a 5400RPM - not sure which you would have.

The kits can be purchased here - Other World Computing (macsales.com)

I can vouch for the company and their products, delivery and service, but be aware you will have to pay tax on the goods coming in to the UK so you may find it cheaper elsewhere.

Finally - you may be experiencing the disk spikes if you are running out of RAM and OSX is using virtual memory on the HDD. You may therefore prevent the problems from happening if you max out your RAM, although the speed of data access on the SSD would also help prevent this.

Summary - I think the perfect solution may be; max RAM (8GB I think?), SSD system disk, swap the optical for HDD for audio ONLY, external backup via FW or USB. I'd avoid thunderbolt from a cost point of view atm.

Sorry it's my cpu meter that's up at the top. my HD meter will spike but then move up and down near the bottom.

HA! That makes more sense.

that's wiked and give me a lot to look at

-Thanks

-M

Just one more question Alex if you please.

whats the size for the internal SSD would recommend for a system disk? I just had a quick peak at the other world computing site (i'm at work at the moment so i'm a little time restricted). I noticed the SSD drives were 3-6 GB. Just wondering if that is enough...thought i'd need more.

Cheers

-M

I noticed the SSD drives were 3-6 GB. Just wondering if that is enough...thought i'd need more.

Cheers

-M

You are looking at the wrong numbers.

3Gb/s is the Speed of the SATA II Protocol, 6Gb/s for SATA III.

I would recommend at least 120 GB but preferably over 200 GB.

Thanks Eric.

I thought I must have been looking at it wrong.

Cheers