Will a SSD HD instead of a SATA for the OS make any difference at the opening of Rea

Iokanaan · 06-28-2021, 03:02 AM

Reaper ?

Hello guys,

I am working on a big project with all the songs of several albums included. When I open Reaper, the software takes several minutes to open the project - quite long.

As I am going to change my config but will also try not to make useless expenses and purchases, I was wondering, if I took a SSD hard drive for the drive on which the windows system (and Reaper) are installed, will it make it faster at the opening of Reaper in general and my project or not ? Given that the audio files that are to be loaded are on a separate SATA drive anyway and will not be included on the system SSD if I take one.

If there is a real, significant difference, I will make the purchase. If not, I will stick to my SATA drive.

Thank you in advance for your inputs.

serr · 06-28-2021, 08:24 AM

I think you mean to ask if there's a difference between SATA connected SSDs vs NVME (pci) connected SSDs?

For running audio? Short answer: no.

First gen SSDs were a magnitude faster than the old spinning HDDs. And that was with earlier slower versions of SATA. That was the point the hard drive bottleneck vanished.

If you were recording raw 1080p or higher video (especially something like raw 4k), THEN you'd want a NVME connected SSD to handle the data rate.

If by chance you instead meant to ask about SSD vs HDD, however, that is a big YES!
(And SATA connected SSDs would be just fine as mentioned.)

Iokanaan · 06-28-2021, 09:18 AM

The question was the second one

.
Thank you very much for your answer.

serr · 06-28-2021, 10:25 AM

In that case:
Get the SATA SSD. Clone your current HDD drive volume to it. Install it.

OS and apps on the SSD. The free space will be your high performance audio workspace. Use other internal SATA connected HDDs for data archive. (And you can open projects from a HDD in a pinch. Things just won't be as snappy. An ultra large project that actually requires audio to be on a SSD might not work but everything else would.)

DON'T ever record to a USB connected external drive! This can lead to a "cache to nowhere" scenario that has been identified with all OS. (Mac/Linux/Windows)

You don't need to split audio to a separate SSD like what was recommended in the past with HDDs. The SSD performance is so much greater. Not unless you're doing over the top live performance work with live sampler plugins or something like that. Or heavy video work.

BillT · 07-10-2021, 06:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by serr

I think you mean to ask if there's a difference between SATA connected SSDs vs NVME (pci) connected SSDs?

For running audio? Short answer: no.

\

Pardon my hijacking... But I see the SATA vs NVME on SSD's. I'm pulling the trigger on a Dell with a NVME SSD. I didn't consider SATA vs PCI to connect them. So I'm thinking either way, a vast improvement over the spinning disk regardless then.