Thread: SSDs for DAWs
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Old 06-04-2019, 10:00 AM   #21
serr
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Join Date: Sep 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by fred garvin View Post

@serr: Yah, you're full SSD, right, and obviously you take this stuff seriously. I had heard about the SSD/HDD thing some time ago, like when 128 GB units went for hundreds lol. It makes sense SSDs would have improved. But I thought I should ask. That being said, I think I am going to do the SSD/HDD at least to get things up and running, evaluate from there. M2s are actually crazy cheap it seems, unless I'm missing something, have the wrong one or whatever. Like here's a 500GB Crucial for $66:
https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-500GB...search&sr=8-22
But I'ma wait and get the machine and physically and visually confirm what I need. Like I see there's two incompatible formats, 1 notch and 2. Don't wanna ass-ume anything lol.
Both actually.
I use SSDs for the system drives and the high performance audio workspace on the Mac Pro.
I have 2TB and 4TB HDDs for data drives.
I still have a SSD and a 1TB HDD in my Macbook Pro too.

You can certainly run a lot of projects off the HDD without a hitch. Again though, if you are working on a projects with many edits and a few hundred tracks, you'll get little GUI pauses if you try to go wild seeking all over (plunking the play head around quickly). It's just 100% full speed zero lag with a SSD.

Back when I first started running live sound with Reaper with a late 2008 2.8GHz C2D laptop, a SSD was required to let me simultaneously record all the multitrack to files. An HDD would have been too much of a bottleneck in the system.

M.2 are coming down in price like everything else it looks like.
Haven't had the opportunity to switch and honestly, both SATA2 and SATA3 are fast enough bus speeds with SATA SSDs that it's a moot point in my systems currently. Not a bottleneck. And the newer Apple machines that use M.2 are disposable garbage so...

There ARE some "in-between" M.2-like formats to watch out for too! And this includes some Apple machines. I don't have a complete list of all the in-between ones in front of me. That would be a cool post if someone has notes on that!

I remember a forum post a while ago from a Dell user that discovered their M.2 slot was proprietary and either not compatible with standard M.2 or it was something like couldn't boot from it unless they hacked their EFI firmware.

Spend a minute looking things up for your machine!
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