Am thinking of getting a solid state hard drive after having to many hard discs die from bumps.
I know it’s no substitute for not being a klutz and backing up, but it’ll help and obviously the speedy load times would be better than a kick up the arse.
But I’m wondering if something like Renoise (which I believe does a lot of writing temporary files?) might eat up the SSDs more limited write cycles and burn out the drive a bit too fast. Whaddya reckon?
I use an SSD for my sample libraries like the Quantum Leap packs. (Symphonic Orchestra and Choirs). For these kind of purposes, SSD really rocks because you can stream faster and make your buffers smaller (so less RAM overhead) without having glitches. Also for any other sample livbrary plugin that supports DFD and well, for Renoise DFD is still a plan as well.
But i would not use it to constantly write and update songs to (or put your OS on it).
I ran into one annoying problem though:the drive somehow got into read-only mode or write protected mode (which caused problems me not being able to update the sample library) and when i looked it up on google, it seems a common problem with a lot of external USB drives but also quite some SSD drives suffer from it.
The only way i got it fixed was removing the driver from the driver manager and then unplug the drive and replug the drive again. Just a smart tip for in the future.
Good infos here! I’ve been looking into this as well, as I’m in the process of building a new puter and reinstalling everything (i7, Windows 7 64bit).
I was wondering about hard drives though, a general rule with sequencers seems to be to keep sample libraries on one drive and do recordings on another. Renoise handles some of this stuff a bit differently than many sequencers, like storing the contained audio in a zip file during saving, which I reallyreallyreally love. Anyway, I have to admit I’m not actually sure how it uses the files DURING composing/recording, so how would you recommend I split a 150GB, a 300GB and a 500GB SATA-drive for optimal Renoise use?
This is what I’m thinking.
HD1, 300GB for Windows+apps
HD2, 500GB for samples+vsti-samplebanks+Renoise songfiles
HD3, 150GB random stuff/music+video files I tend to move/copy around alot, so keeping them here I guess I wouldn’t have to defragment the more important drives that often…
Or would I also benefit from keeping the samples/audiobanks and Renoise songfiles on different drives. Any insight on this appreciated.
Renoise loads everything into RAM and then accesses it from there. There is currently no direct disk access for playback or record.
Is that three separate drives? You wont gain much by partitioning a single drive more than OS and Data partitions.
Separate drive. 150GB as OS (probably a couple of partitions so you can try Win8/Linux etc if you wish. 300GB I would maybe use for recording and any sample libraries you have for samplers that do have direct from disk access. 500GB main sample and Renoise song storage (and then if/when direct access is added to Renoise it would be separated from the other drive.) For now would probably but the paging file on the 500GB one as it’s good to have it away from the main OS drive and you don’t want it on one which is used for streaming. Although I’d probably move it back to the OS one if Renoise does bring it in and you can always have more than one if you wish (going on XP assumptions, I don’t yet use Win7.)
Different people would probably do it differently so it depends on your needs.
I’m a happy SSD (OCZ Vertex 2 120GB, 2.5", SATA II) user since almost a year. Never experienced any problems of any kind. I’m using it as a system-drive running Win7 x64. All plugins, everything OS-relevant, my xrns files and most applications reside on that drive and the speed-up compared to my formerly used WD-Raptor-Raid0 Array is outstanding. The whole OS feels way more responsive, being able to launch everything as if it was already loaded into cache (RAM).
My sample libraries reside on a 2TB HDD though, simply because there would be severe size issues regarding the SSD’s storage capacity.
Whenever you get an SSD you should definately make sure it’s formatted with the right 4k cluster alignment. Win7 will do that by default when installed on an SSD, but other OS might fail at that. You should also try to use the msahci controller driver for maximum performance and feature support (e.g. TRIM).
AS SSD Benchmark is a good tool to check all of the above and more.
Thanks for the thoughts.
Consensus definitely seems to be that SSDs are best left for read-only media.
So good for sample libararies, but I just want a rock-solid place to keep my working projects.
So I’ve settled for keeping all my projects in a Dropbox folder.
The way Renoise packages all the samples makes this a pretty elegant solution for bullet-proof files.
Out of curiosity, where are the temporary zip files created between saves?
In RAM, or on the HD somewhere?
EDIT:
Haha now Keiths account is making me reconsider the consensus…
In the Temp folder, in case something goes wrong during saving/copying your file to the actual location, you can restore it from the temp folder.
But i advise you to use the autobackup feature.
You don’t need it often, but you will always be thankful that you did the moment shit happens.
Just get yourself 8 or so 15k spin dual ported 6Gb/s SAS drives and a controller with some battery backed cache, throw them all in RAID1+0 and eat SSDs on all fronts 
Oh, except power usage, space, noise and cost…
SAS is pretty overkill for a home machine, +quite noisy and very heat generous (requires quite some cooling)
And random access times are still not faster than SSD’s.
go ssd. put your os on it, put your samples on it, back up your system regularly like always and stop worrying about the lifecycle of ssd. the lifecycle of ssd argument is way overstated and over-geeked.
I’ve had an ssd drive in my sony vaio for 2+ years under heavy heavy use - it’s fast as shit and still kickin after installing and re-installing about a bazillion different linux kernels, saving files constantly, dropbox, you name it.
The laptop itself? that’s a different story… case is cracked, on my second LCD… point is your ssd will outlive the computer you have it in.
Thats what I wanted to hear!
I’ve only over heard it’s TECHNICALLY a bad idea, but real life stories seem fine…