Are your read/write speeds faster with a SSD vs a SATA drive?

[Paolo]

Hello all,

The hard drive I use to record and playback audio just died (I have everything backed-up) and am looking at hard drive choices for my 2012 MacPro.

I have three SATA drives: one for the OS and Logic program; another SATA drive for Sample Libraries and a third SATA for older sessions.

My question is – have you found it to be a worthwhile benefit using a SSD drive to read/ write audio or does the benefit of an SSD drive mostly matter for the OS or sample libraries?

I’m heading to microcenter this evening so any help and insights you can share would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Paolo

[Paolo]

bump

[Mark_Petrie]

everything is faster with SSDs, and you can’t kill them as easily 🙂

[Paolo]

thanks Mark! That helps – I wasn’t sure if SSDs only made sense for the OS/Logic Pro and sample libraries.

[Art Munson]

I’m late to the game on this as I had some bad luck with SSDs a few years ago. In the last week I went with Samsung SSDs for OS and sample drive. Will try audio next. I was under the impression that SSDs don’t perform as well on writing data (audio drives) as opposed to reading data.

[Paolo]

I would be interested in hearing how it’s going for you.

Is it much faster than SATA – with not just booting up but also better recording and playback buffer sizes; loading plugins and samples (although some sample libraries I believe load samples in RAM and aren’t shuttled back and forth).

Really, any comparison to the SATA drives would be helpful since this is a new and current move for you. Thanks Art.

[Art Munson]

Hi Paolo,

Definitely faster booting up, loading Sonar and samples and I didn’t buy the latest iteration. My sample drive is the Samsung 860 EVO – 2TB, about $500. My OS is same model but 1 TB at about $250. The hot one is SSD on a card and is the Samsung 970 EVO at $1300 for 2TB.

Art

[Paolo]

Thanks Art. Being curious about why you chose SSD on a card (and not SATA based) for that third SSD – I had to look up the difference. So the PCIe based SSD is 4-5 times faster than the SATA based SSD. Good to know!

[FrankieD]

What is significantly faster, like 3 times as fast as standard SSD is Sonnet Technologies PCI-E card with 4 embedded 2 TB SSD’s. The read/write time is supposed to be 1.4 GBps and the standard SSD drive is said to be 0.4 GBps.

B= Byte.

Although they now have PC Drives with up to 5 GBps these are not what they recommend for Mac.

Mine will be here next week. I’ll let you know if I see a difference in speed from my current SSD drives.

[Author]

Posts