laptop performance gain with SSD?

[zephonic]

I understand that Solid State Disks theoretically have better performance because there aren't any moving parts etc. but after some googling around, I have heard reports to the contrary.

 

Anybody know what the real deal is, and more importantly, would a Macbook with SSD offer significantly better performance (for playback of large libraries, think Ivory etc.) over a Macbook Pro with a regular harddisk?

 

[timwat]

Zeph:

 

I've read the same contrarian anecdotes about Macs w/ SSD. Can't confirm or deny, too much $$ for me.

 

Instead I've gone with eSATA express card and WD 1TB eSATA external drive. I have Ivory Italian Grand loaded on it for my live piano solution. There are real benefits to running eSATA rather than FW800, that I can attest to.

[zephonic]

I guess you're right, but the idea was to lose all the external stuff and just gig with a laptop and a controller. What are the benefits of eSATA? Dependability or performance?

[TJ Cornish]

A well-designed SSD is 3 - 100 times faster than a spinning disk, depending on exactly what you are doing.

 

In single large file sequential transfer, conventional disks are at their best. Doing random reads and writes, spinning disks need to wait for the head to move and the platter to spin to the correct place, so a lot of the time is spent waiting, and therefore not transferring data.

 

Many el-cheapo SSDs (cheap is relative - they're all several hundred dollars) have a bug where random performance is poor due to bad cache design. The best ones (Intel and a few others) are correctly optimized and make a huge difference to computer performance, as long as your bottleneck is IO. If your computer is CPU bound, it won't make any difference at all.

 

 

Are you currently having trouble with Ivory on your MacBook Pro? An SSD may very well help that, as long as you get the right one, and not a bad one.

 

Read this for tons of great info:

 

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

 

 

[Joe Muscara]

They will get better, and are much less likely to go bad over time vs. a drive with a motor, spinning platters, and a head. While there is always room for failures, they should have much less.

 

It's also possible that while the SSD may be theoretically faster, it may end up being limited by current bus speeds. I haven't compared the numbers, however. The SSDs may be no where near that limit.

 

I cannot wait for the prices to come down, capacities to go up, and get rid of HDs forever.

[BillWelcome Home Studios]

I am not a keyboard player, so you may have specific needs which I don't have.

 

But for audio recording or playback, I know that I can handle quite a few tracks on any of my laptops.

 

As the various sample libraries are mostly a memory issue, can you load up on memory?

 

In terms of the SS drives, because they are relatively new, the technology is still having some growing pains. And the price to performance ratio is also not on your side yet. If you choose to take that route, you could be ahead of the curve; or you could be stuck and screwed.

 

I used to like to be ahead of the curve. I found that having the advanced technology in the studio usually paid for itself for the early adopters, even though the cost was high. I take a much more conservative approach to remote or performance though, because the reliability to me is more important than being the first on the block with a new geegaw.

 

Bill

[gliderproarc]

I don't think spinning HDs will ever disappear. While SSDs have many advantages, Data recovery is still far superior on platters. If my music machine goes down and I didn't back up since my last project was completed, I want to be able to get at that stuff.

[Throbert]

Maybe Use SATA SSD for OS only

[Bridog6996]

I would still prefer a fast disc drive for audio use. On paper, solid-state would seem to be better, but it's still relatively new technology, and I don't think it's quite there yet. Not to mention that current SS drives are very limited in storage capability at the moment, and with a very high $$$$-to-gigabytes ratio. My studio laptop is running a 320gb, 7200 rpm Seagate Momentus drive, and the thing flies. 7200 rpm is currently the fastest drive you can get for a laptop (desktops are up to 15,000 now), but I've never had even the slightest hitch at 7200. I'd recommend it. I wouldn't spend the money on solid state yet. That's my 2 cents anyway.

[timwat]

Zeph:

 

Advantage of eSATA over FW800 is theoretical throughput - i.e., performance. eSATA is supposed to be roughly 3 times faster than FW800 in transfer speed. While in the real world I don't think we see anything close to 85% of theoretical ceiling, I can tell you that playing live, using the same drive and identical Ivory settings, FW800 introduces enough latency for clicks and crap, while eSATA hums along glitch free. What I could find online about current SSD performance didn't convince me the $$ was worth it, despite as you note it would yield a "two-box" approach - laptop and controller.

[zephonic]

Did some research:

 

"Which is better, Solid State drives or Hard drives? The guys over at Bare Feats decided to do a comparison using the late 2008 MacBook Pro with a 2.8GHz lab rat with the 7200rpm 320GB, which is of course a Hitachi Travelstar 7K320 against a OCZ Core Series 128GB Solid State Drive.

 

And they found that the 128GB OCZ Core Series SSD is faster than the 320GB Hitachi 7K320 HDD when it comes to sustained large and small READS. When it came to large sustained WRTIES the SSD came out slightly faster, but there were mixed results with small random WRITES.

 

Therefore, they conclude that the SSD id better for speedier booting, waking and launching, but however does not give any improvement over a fast HDD when saving small random data or capturing large data blocks."

http://www.cheaplaptops.org.uk/20081028/ssds-against-hdds-with-macbook-pro/

 

I would reason that for playing back something like Ivory there will be a performance gain as it is mostly reading and not a lot of writing.

 

Thanks Tim, I'll keep that in mind.

 

 

[Bridog6996]

Well, I guess you answered your own question then. For general studio use, there's little to no difference (besides big $$$), but you may see better results if live use is your goal (ie. using Ivory). The other hardware inside the computer is just as important, though. Especially for Ivory. It's memory, memory, and more memory. If you have an optimal set-up, a fast platter drive will definitely get the job done without the need to spend all that extra money.

 

Solid state drives do, however, have the added benefit of greatly extending your computer's battery life.

 

In the end, it comes down to your budget, and whether you think it's worth it. Keep in mind that the average price per gigabyte for a solid state drive is roughly quadruple that of a quality platter drive.

[burningbusch]

Zeph:

 

Advantage of eSATA over FW800 is theoretical throughput - i.e., performance. eSATA is supposed to be roughly 3 times faster than FW800 in transfer speed. While in the real world I don't think we see anything close to 85% of theoretical ceiling, I can tell you that playing live, using the same drive and identical Ivory settings, FW800 introduces enough latency for clicks and crap, while eSATA hums along glitch free. What I could find online about current SSD performance didn't convince me the $$ was worth it, despite as you note it would yield a "two-box" approach - laptop and controller.

 

I would argue it has nothing to do with the bandwidth of FW800 or eSATA. Ivory, using the default 24 notes (stereo) of polyphony will require ~50Mbps of bandwidth. Even at a full 88 stereo notes (if you could ever generate that), that's 186Mbps.

 

I have run Ivory off internal ATA, eSATA, FW400 and USB 2.0 drives (all 7,200 rpm). I can detect no impact on performance. The original Receptor used an internal ATA drive and was able to run Ivory at very low latency. I run the EW Play pianos off a USB 2.0 7,200 rpm drive, and they are much more disk intensive than Ivory.

 

Busch.

[timwat]

Well, since in my rig the only swap was FW800 vs. eSATA (same laptop, same drive, etc., etc.,), I have no other anecdotal explanation.

[gangsu]

It's news to me that Ivory's default polyphony is 24 instances. The VSL Bosendorfer is 64, and I thought "well no wonder it runs so well"... that's low polyphony by yesterday's standards. ?

 

Anyway, for comparison's sake, that library is 38 GB and it plays fine on my Macbook's internal (5,400 rpm) drive at the default settings.

 

If I were looking to play Ivory in the simplest manner, I'd install it on the [regular] internal drive first to see if it's problem.

[TJ Cornish]

I don't think spinning HDs will ever disappear. While SSDs have many advantages, Data recovery is still far superior on platters. If my music machine goes down and I didn't back up since my last project was completed, I want to be able to get at that stuff.

 

This is a really curious perspective to me. With the cost of data recovery easily being several hundred dollars and possibly thousands, not to mention down time, I don't plan on ever using a commercial data recovery company. RAID 1 or 5 is so easy to implement these days, and completely solves this problem. Some of the cooler NAS devices even have snapshots so if you delete something accidentally, you can recover from the trash can at some point.

 

Check these out:

 

NetGear Home Storage

 

I'm an IT guy by day, and this is very squarely in my world. We will have conventional disks for the next probably 10 years, but I disagree that we will have them forever. In the 2.5" laptop form factor, SSDs have already surpassed spinning disks in capacity, and as I mentioned in another post, are much faster than conventional drives. The biggest problem SSDs have, obviously, is the cost per GB. The good news is that SSD cost per GB is going down at something like 50% or more per year. Ultimately, SSDs will be able to be manufactured more cheaply than conventional disks, as there are fewer components

[TJ Cornish]

They will get better, and are much less likely to go bad over time vs. a drive with a motor, spinning platters, and a head. While there is always room for failures, they should have much less.

 

It's also possible that while the SSD may be theoretically faster, it may end up being limited by current bus speeds. I haven't compared the numbers, however. The SSDs may be no where near that limit.

 

I cannot wait for the prices to come down, capacities to go up, and get rid of HDs forever.

 

 

Good SSDs are not just theoretically faster - they are proven to be faster. You do have to pay up for the good drives, though, some of the cheapo ones do truly suck.

 

The big benefit of SSD is random access. In a conventional drive, each disk seek takes 5 to 10 milliseconds. That means that even the best enterprise drives can only do about 100 - 200 seeks in a second. If those seeks are for small blocks of data due to either disk fragmentation or two processes trying to access the disk at once (think antivirus software running in the background), your fast 7200 RPM drive starts performing more like a floppy disk as your data rate can fall to just a couple hundred KB/sec. SSD's don't have this limitation - every seek takes the same amount of time - about 1% of what a conventional drive seek takes.

 

As for bandwidth issues: this affects both conventional and SSD drives equally - there isn't some penalty for SSD. The current SATA 3.0 spec allows for data rates around 300MB/sec. There isn't a conventional drive made that can stream data this fast at the moment. There are a few SSDs that are getting close. The SATA 6.0 spec is coming soon, which will double the bandwidth to 600MB/sec: SATA specifications.

 

For comparison purposes - my company purchases giant disk drives called Storage Area Networks. These are racks of hard drives that combine to make big and fast disk drives for servers to access. We just bought a couple of new ones last fall which we paid somewhere in the mid 5 figure range, and they top out at about 1400MB/sec. Having a desktop drive available in the next year or two that can do 500MB/sec will be truly amazing, considering what it takes today to do that.

[TJ Cornish]

Zeph:

 

Advantage of eSATA over FW800 is theoretical throughput - i.e., performance. eSATA is supposed to be roughly 3 times faster than FW800 in transfer speed. While in the real world I don't think we see anything close to 85% of theoretical ceiling, I can tell you that playing live, using the same drive and identical Ivory settings, FW800 introduces enough latency for clicks and crap, while eSATA hums along glitch free. What I could find online about current SSD performance didn't convince me the $$ was worth it, despite as you note it would yield a "two-box" approach - laptop and controller.

 

If you're having this problem, then something is wrong with your firewire setup. Are you sharing multiple devices on the same FW bus? FW800 can move about 80MB/sec and that is more than pretty much any single drive can push.

[TommyBoy]

Here are a lot of hard numbers courtesy of the MacRumors forums. They run bench tests on a number of scenarios and "discuss" what they mean. It's entertaining. My opinion: Wait another year for the prices to come way down and the capacity to go way up. I have no issues with a 250Gb 7200rpm in my MBP and Logic studio, but I don't tax it in the least. Personally, I think my 4Gb of RAM has more of an effect.

 

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=658571

 

Edit: One additional note - these guys were buying the 256Gb Samsung SSD off of eBay as people were removing them from Dell laptops and selling them. Looks like with the last couple posts they are now for sale at NewEgg for $669. Nice 1,000,000 MTBF number!!!!!

 

[BillWelcome Home Studios]

I'm just asking what you keyboard/sampler types are really needing for playback, not arguing which is faster.

 

I mean, we run an Audi TT... far more power than we need for city driving, one would think. But at times, that extra power has enabled us to avoid disaster that would have hit us in a car with less power.

 

There isn't a performance speed question about solid state verses spinning platters. But are splinning platters not up to the task? (passing for a moment all the other possible issues with a solid state drive, verses a hard disk...)

 

Hard disks give me all the performance (in terms of track numbers) that I need of recording and playback, but SS is offering size and silence, both helpful to me. (again, ignoring other issues, which time will sort out.) I can see the value, but not to me right now. Would you as a key player see a value to paying the permium price for the extra performance or not? Some here say, "Not".

 

Bill

[BillWelcome Home Studios]

... Nice 1,000,000 MTBF number!!!!!

 

cute number, but would it hold in our environment?

 

Bill

[timwat]

Bill:

 

To answer your question (the first one) - all I was looking for was a usable acoustic piano solution. It was just a tools-for-the-job problem to solve, based upon a very limited budget and the hardware I already owned.

 

So any solution that gets it running without clicks, dropouts or problems works for me. The one I cobbled together is probably overkill, and provides capacity/ability for future expansion. I'm guessing that's the bottom line for all of us here.

 

Tim

[zephonic]

Reason I started this thread originally, was because I'm trying to figure out whether a Macbook with SSD could be a better purchase than a Macbook Pro with a regular HD.

A MB Pro basemodel with 4GB and 250GB/5400rpm SATA disk costs $2099, whereas the entry-level Macbook with 4GB and 256GB SSD goes for $2299.

I wonder which would give me better performance for playing back larger libraries such as Ivory or whatever. I have not yet found any head-to-head comparos.

 

[timwat]

Macbook has no FW, no ExpressCard port, only USB2.0. MBP has FW (800 only) and ExpressCard. My initial reaction would be MBP for that reason alone, your mileage may vary.

[zephonic]

Right, no FW. Shucks.