MBP + SSD drive

[Steve Force]

I also question AG's expensive investment/questionable benefit comment. Perhaps a few years ago but today? Really?

[johnchop]

And yeah, I know the above example is imprecise, but it's nonetheless illustrative.

[Ashville.Guru]

Questionable benefits? No, I don't think they're questionable, especially if you are doing patch changes in something like Omnisphere. You might not care how long it takes to boot your machine (i.e. recover from failure) or load a sample set, but I'm sure others might.

Yes, questionable benefits - relative to audio performance, and in the specific context of live playing. The elaboration is there above the line you quoted.

 

I strongly contend that booting and loading are not activities ideal for the stage, to begin with. Laptops have had sleep/wake modes for years now, so why not take advantage? The prudent approach would be to load your samples at home. In my experience, when things go wrong, it's more often than not at load time. I leave for the gig only after verifying that load up is A-Ok.

 

So my load time on stage is 0 seconds, which is infinitely faster than anything an SSD can provide. And as for recovery from crashes, as I've said earlier, prevention trumps cure. Since discovering the sleep/wake trick, I've never had to recover the system on stage - in dozens of gigs.

 

Now, claiming better audio performance would silly, but for getting the data into RAM, there's no contest.

But that's the whole point I'm making! If you read what I've said, on stage, how fast you get data into RAM ought to be irrelevant in the first place. Better audio performance must be given much higher weightage, surely.

 

But John, I really do appreciate your video comparison, which I recall seeing sometime back. Even if it isn't precise, it gives a good quantitative feel for the specific benefit, which is very valuable. I just wish we had something similar for audio performance and SSDs.

 

Steve - I haven't checked the relative prices of SSD/HDDs, but I mentioned 'expensive' since I recall a specific thread a couple of years back, wherein someone chose to invest in the SSD over an i7. I'm not sure what the current price difference is for a 1 TB internal drive, but to put it in perspective - about $200-$250 will get you an external interface that will assuredly boost your audio performance by upto 3-4 times. Still I've edited the post, with a qualification.

 

- Guru

 

 

[johnchop]

AG,

 

Appreciate the clarification. I was thinking about patch changing specifically, which really isn't an audio performance issue, but it can be a live playing issue.

 

So, if I understand you here, a comparison of latency/CPU usage for spinning platters versus SSD while performing with sample streaming could be interesting. I could probably even do that comparison if I had the time and energy, but I'm usually out of gas for IT projects once day job is over.

 

-J

[Markay]

And all this with a humble 5,400RPM HDD, not an SSD...!

 

Which reinforces my skepticism that the SSD had much to do with Ian's rig performance. Like I said, it's hard to pinpoint where the bottleneck is in a complex system.

 

If you look at 'laptop for live rig recommendation' threads here and elsewhere, SSDs seem to receive an inordinate amount of attention. Faster boot/load times/overall system responsiveness are all fine. But what really determines a good live setup is how many plugins you can run simultaneously, and at what buffer size.

 

Which is why the inordinate attention to SSDs baffles me. The awesome headroom in my setup comes from the i7 processor and the firewire interface. There are several studies out there that practically demonstrate how important these two are to headroom, and I've experienced it firsthand myself. There are no such practical demonstrations anywhere of the contribution of SSDs to audio processing.

 

And yet I've seen many cases where people have compromised with an i5 processor, because of budget constraints after shelling money for SSDs...! That's sad, really. Hence my persistent line of skeptical questioning.

 

tl;dr: SSDs are an expensive(*) investment with questionable (at best) benefits to a live rig. There are other specs which have more guaranteed, demonstrable benefits.

 

AG all this might be relevant if everybody wanted to use a laptop live for same things as you.

 

Based on recent posts here the requirements range from the simple, running VB3 in a host to the complex, for example your requirements. My requirements fit somewhere in the middle.

 

There are folks happily running VB3 in the free version of Cantabile or other free host on Atom powered Netbooks.

 

Your rig sans SSD is at the other end of the spectrum.

 

In the middle are most of us and some with 5 year old hardware that they would like to keep using for as long as possible.

 

For these folks being told that they are wasting their time and money by adding an SSD unless they upgrade their processor and RAM is not very meaningful.

 

The fact is that an SSD will feed up sample streams etc. to RAM and the CPU much faster than a HDD. Therefore when using samples and large size samples as JohnChop illustrated you can be certain that you are getting as much out of your existing CPU and RAM as is possible. Similarly faster access for virtual memory if that is invoked.

 

So what is the downside if there is no improvement in audio performance? You have spent $250 and own a 250gig SSD. Stick the HDD back in your existing machine and buy a new laptop and use the additional SSD as a substitute for the optical drive.

 

Upgrading a CPU in a laptop is more complicated than throwing a new motherboard and CPU into a desktop even on a Win machine. Similarly laptops have limited memory slots so it is inevitably new larger sticks of RAM if you want to upgrade. But then what is the point if you are still using a 32 bit operating system?

 

Lets turn the issue around about there being no research supporting the hypothesis that SSD's provide better audio performance. How many reports are they are people who upgraded to SSD and then took it out and went back to HDD because the SSD made no difference or degraded audio performance?

 

My advice to the OP would be that switching to SSD:

- Will provide a guaranteed improvement in boot, load and shutdown times; and

- May provide an improvement in audio performance.

 

And out of curiosity why did you spec up a Win 7 64 i7 machine with 8 gigs of RAM and choose the slowest, smallest available HDD?

 

[Ian Benhamou]

Would you mind detailing a little more about your rig

 

It's a fairly complex and customized setup. I could go into details but it would be best served if I took pics and maybe some video at the next gig. I only use this setup on my Beatles tribute gigs. Next gig is march 1st so I'll try and take the time at soundcheck to dicuss it in it's own thread.

 

Also, I'm not the one who designed the setup, it's all the Technical Director, who is quite the wiz with computers, who designed and programmed the whole thing.

 

In all there's 2 MBPs, 2 iPads, three keyboard controllers, a Motu Midi patch bay, RME MADI interface, a Yamaha LS-9 digital console connected to the MADI via an optical cableam I forgetting anything??? I don't even remember.

 

The system takes care of ALL keyboard sounds, vocal effects, Bass guitar processing, in-ear monitoring, Vocal mics mute/un-mute, multitrack recording, etc

 

Like I said.crazy stuff! New thread coming!

[Ashville.Guru]

I was thinking about patch changing specifically, which really isn't an audio performance issue, but it can be a live playing issue.

Aha! Now I see the source of the confusion. Let's make this clear:

 

For live playing, under no circumstance is patch changing via loading new samples a wise or prudent option.

 

If you're relying on sample loading on stage for patch changes, you're doing something terribly wrong. There are several ways of switching patches without loading new samples, for e.g. through channel changes. Yes, I'm aware that Omnisphere has only 8 parts, so the solution is to use multiple instances.

 

The downsides of sample loading for patch changes are just too many. There's the delay in switching, not to mention the CPU overhead, which can have cascade effects leading to instability. Seriously, when loading samples during setup itself is a bad idea, how much more of a bad idea is it to load samples while actually playing?

 

I'll say this again: if you want hardware-like stability and performance, the stage is no place to be loading samples, period. How fast your SSD lets you load those samples is therefore immaterial.

 

- Guru

[Ashville.Guru]

For these folks being told that they are wasting their time and money by adding an SSD unless they upgrade their processor and RAM is not very meaningful.

...

So what is the downside if there is no improvement in audio performance? You have spent $250 and own a 250gig SSD. Stick the HDD back in your existing machine and buy a new laptop and use the additional SSD as a substitute for the optical drive.

Very valid points - but wouldn't it be simply more sensible to put that $250 into an interface which is demonstrably guaranteed to give you 3-4 times more audio processing power? Why recommend investment on something whose benefits have never been seen outside the realm of theory?

 

Lets turn the issue around about there being no research supporting the hypothesis that SSD's provide better audio performance. How many reports are they are people who upgraded to SSD and then took it out and went back to HDD because the SSD made no difference or degraded audio performance?

Like I said a few posts above, the overall, general system performance improvement is so obvious, that everyone who's switched to SSDs seems very happy with the investement - audio performance be hanged...! So I wouldn't conclude anything from the lack of negative reports, either.

 

And out of curiosity why did you spec up a Win 7 64 i7 machine with 8 gigs of RAM and choose the slowest, smallest available HDD?

Funny story, actually. Sometime last year my laptop suffered a fall while running (), and the 7,200 RPM HDD conked. I decided that it was time to go the SSD route, for samples! But I need lots of space for my professional/personal stuff, and a 1TB SSD still is a very sizeable investment, and overkill. I figured the sensible investment would be to have 2 drives (like Reezekeys): a 1TB, slow one, and a small fast SSD, just for samples. So I started off with the former (5,400 RPM).

 

Now I have my own crude stress-test benchmarks of different kinds, and I have some for samples. Since I had downgraded the disk speed, I expected the performance to be hit, if at least by a small margin. To my surprise, I could see no significant change whatsoever! And that's when I started wondering whether disk read/write contributes anything at all to audio performance.

 

Since then, I've never found enough justification to add that second SSD.

 

- Guru

[Markay]

Funny story, actually. Sometime last year my laptop suffered a fall while running (), and the 7,200 RPM HDD conked. I decided that it was time to go the SSD route, for samples! But I need lots of space for my professional/personal stuff, and a 1TB SSD still is a very sizeable investment, and overkill. I figured the sensible investment would be to have 2 drives (like Reezekeys): a 1TB, slow one, and a small fast SSD, just for samples. So I started off with the former (5,400 RPM).

 

Now I have my own crude stress-test benchmarks of different kinds, and I have some for samples. Since I had downgraded the disk speed, I expected the performance to be hit, if at least by a small margin. To my surprise, I could see no significant change whatsoever! And that's when I started wondering whether disk read/write contributes anything at all to audio performance.

 

Since then, I've never found enough justification to add that second SSD.

 

- Guru

Bummer, I am fortunate in that my gigging laptop is only used for MainStage, it does not have to serve general duty, I have a laptop running Win 7 for everything else. When the HDD failed I figured a 250 gig SSD would remove the worry of heads hitting platters and give me faster load times. Like you I hadn't found the HDD to be a bottle neck for the patches I had set up, but then again my machine produced some very impressive geekbench scores for that hardware combination running OSX when it was first built.

[ITGITC]

 

Samsung SSD + their RAPID feature in Magician software = double the throughput!

 

KLONK!

 

mSATA 1TB EVO is just $0.67/GB! KLONK!

 

RAPID is a software-based feature in Samsung's most recent build of Magician. Simply, it uses a gigabyte of system memory for caching hot data. Frequently-used applications are stored in RAM, ideally yielding much faster accesses when that data is needed over and over. Unlike other RAM-based caching solutions, RAPID keeps cached data persistent between reboots by writing information to the SSD itself.

2.5" 1TB EVO is now only $0.50/GB! KLONK!

 

IMO, SSD is the only way to go - especially for a portable machine.

 

No spinning disks + No flying heads = much better chances of survival if dropped.

 

A SSD is the best upgrade that can be made to any machine (that already has an adequate amount of RAM).

 

The huge performance gains - especially when used as a system drive - and peace of mind a SSD offers are certainly worth consideration for any player who uses a laptop on stage.

 

[Leh173]

Someone asked a few posts back what the specs of my machine were before the SSD upgrade. It's a 2007 MacBook Pro 3,1 2.4ghz machine 4GB RAM, 500GB 7200 RPM drive. The upgrade was to a Samsung 840 EVO series 500GB drive for $A370. I did this mainly for a system performance hike for my machine. Many people had recommended it as OSX depends greatly on virtual memory and the disk swapping and general disk access would be much faster. The machine's SATA bus is too slow to take advantage of the full speed of the SSD, but I have the option of migrating the drive to newer machine (mac mini etc) in the future if that is the way I go. I moved the old 7200 RPM drive into a caddy for the the optical bay slot (so connected by PATA) as an experiment. In theory the PATA connected drive should have the same or better speed than an externally connected USB2 or Firewire drive.

 

So what happened? Simply the overall system performance of the machine was extraordinarily enhanced to a level which really surprised me. It basically allows this machine to live on with current software and a decent performance level. The upgrade to 10.8.5 was painless, and Mavericks should be fine, possibly even better due to the new RAM file swapping arrangement for virtual memory.

 

As for strictly audio performance, the previous configuration was quite good, I was generally happy with it and worked out how to get the best out of it. I always work off an external drive for audio recording anyway (3.5" 7200 Firewire), I would always recommend this for studio based work. So how much of improvement audio wise there is is hard to quantify. Though I have been able to work at low buffers (64, even 32) with no dropouts. But that depends on the whole chain (audio interface, speed of machine etc). Still the whole system feels snappier. I haven't tested my old MainStage setup but I might do that and see if it performs better. The joy of Logic Pro being hugely responsive when editing, writing, mixing etc has been fantastic, significantly better than before the upgrade.

 

As for optimum system configurations, professionally all the Pro Tools HD rigs I work on these days have an SSD for system and the SATA connected 7200 drives inside the mac. Audio and Video streamed of different drives. These systems handle track counts going over the 100 mark plus SD or even HD video, plus heavy plug-on loads (always on the cards not CPU). So I follow that basic rule of thumb at home too. Never record to the system drive. So a live laptop rig with an SSD that is not being recorded to should allow files to be loaded in and out of RAM very quickly, and streaming samples should be quicker as well. If recording, maybe the caddy trick is a good one, and pop a 7200 RPM drive in there or SSD if you're worried about moving parts.

 

So if people feel this is waste of money getting the SSD strictly audio wise the by all means don't bother. But for my needs and the fact it help me avoid having to buy a new computer, the $A370 has been very well spent.

 

EDIT: of course one big point here is that mine was an old machine, newer macs may not see the same level of performance increase with larger amounts of RAM etc but still all modern computers are going SSD for a reason in my view. I hadn't realised just how much of bottleneck HDD's actually were on system performance before, because there was nothing else available and we've only just hit the era of crazy amounts of RAM being affordable.

[Joe Muscara]

As far as recording audio, I just remembered something, FWIW.

 

I've done some demos with GarageBand, and with the old HDD which was a 7200 RPM unit, some of the projects would throw errors about not being able to read the files fast enough. With SSD, I never see those errors anymore.

[Leh173]

That's interesting. I'd imagine new fast SATA bus computers and SSD's would be able to handle huge amounts of tracks with too many issues. It's probably just expense and the unknown factor that has kept SSD's out of big Pro Tools rigs for now. The next couple of years should be interesting as SSD's get more affordable. So the slow part in and audio chain will start to be the USB or FW bus for the interface to connect to. I'd love to see connectors with PCIe speeds not sure if thunderbolt is close to that.

[Joe Muscara]

Pro Tools is big on "qualifying" hardware, right? If so, I wonder if that's one of the issues. Perhaps they haven't qualified SSDs, or at least aftermarket ones.

[Leh173]

Yes they do, probably more to do with their support deals than anything else. I'm not sure what the current attitude toward SSD's are, but they might not be qualifying them. Some people still configure systems with un-qualified configs (I worked at a company on one with SAN storage for years, not supported).

 

I suppose audio/music systems configs are a sort or research it and try things out type thing to achieve good performance.

[George88]

Thanks for everyone's input. I installed a 960 gig SSD drive, replacing my DVD/CD Drive and the clicks and pops are gone. I am able to run Ravenscroft with all microphones without a hiccup. With my old system, I could not.

 

 

[Ashville.Guru]

Thanks for everyone's input. I installed a 960 gig SSD drive, replacing my DVD/CD Drive and the clicks and pops are gone. I am able to run Ravenscroft with all microphones without a hiccup. With my old system, I could not.

Glad you're happy with your setup! A couple of quick questions: by old system, are you referring to external FW drive, or internal HDD? Did you get a chance to see if there are pops and clicks with the Ravenscroft samples on your internal HDD?

 

Also, did you use one of those optical tray-hard drive adaptors? I've been eyeing one of those myself.

 

- Guru

[George88]

External FW HD. I had the samples on my external, daisy chained to my I/0.

 

I got the adapter and tool kit from OWC.