Currently I have a nice PC running windows 7 - 64 bit and I've managed to fit all the music, vst etc on a 512gb HD.

I am tempted obviously to move to an SSD drive, especially with the price drops but I always find reinstalling a tad painful and yes I know I could clone to the SSD however I found some software which I bought when I was running XP called eboostr which can use memory and spare HD, usb sticks, SSD drives as cache and it really speeds things up in my DAW, especially loading up lots of rather disk based intense VST's much better than readyboost and will work on XP as well as Windows 7.

Eboostr doesn't really speed up windows boot up but once in the desktop it really does help speed up loading times of the most used apps.

So the ideal solution is to use say a 64 gb SSD as cache, which I did in the past but that SSD drive is in a laptop now, so currenly I used a spare back up old mechanical HD being used as cache and one of those new very fast memory cards plugged in and voila.

Anyway hope others fine it useful tip to speed up the PC obviously in the long term SSD drives will be the solution.

using a drive for caching is pointless (including ssd)
there is absolutely no benefit to audio performance.
in fact even with video (where caching is very important) it did nothing

moving to an SSD for the OS would also yeild no performance gains.
it does make windows snappier..

Scott
ADK

Yes of course you are totally right it makes no difference to performance just loading times. I'm really having second thoughts with it now. I feel simply going SSD is really the way to go, as software solutions might causes other issues, depending on setup.

I have to disagree here. I moved to an SSD drive recently and I have to say it makes loading patches in sampler-heavy synths/tools much faster. I've seen preset loading improvements in:

* Omnisphere and Trilian (especially the acoustic and electric bass presets)
* Camel Audio Alchemy sounds that use large .sfz sources
* Reason combinators like Reason Pianos, Reason Bass, Abbey Roads

Reason loads faster and I'd speculate other DAWS that do a lot of pre-load (Logic, Ableton) might benefit as well.

For these reasons I think an SSD would make a substantial difference for the live musician and slightly-less so for the home producer.

The overall snappiness and responsiveness is very nice though, I definitely would not want to move back to an HDD-only approach again.

Of course this is with me using an SSD directly, I've never used it as a caching source so I can't comment on that. I just wanted to say an SSD can make a considerable difference when used in certain contexts.

I went recently to a 64GB SSD for OS-64bit W-7, programs and VSTs only and it makes a LOT of difference, in my case with NI Maschine, K-8 and libraries (on another HDD).
Loading projects, kits and samples is instant, before it would take a moment depending on the size of a project.
I still have 13GB left before SSD is full.
I think it is a good move charlieejv

You haven't really disagreed. Since jcschild said that caching and/or moving to SSD can speed up loading times only, but not *audio performance*.

It's OK, you just didn't understand so well what he said, probably.

However, I would jump on the opportunity to point out that moving to SSD makes working with your computer not only snapier, but also more *quiet*, by a few watts more energy efficient, and safer, since SSDs cannot fail as easily as HDs. ♥ SSDs! Also, SSDs are the safest medium to make back-ups to [or any flash memory devices, for that matter], but their prices are still a bit too steep to use them for that purpose, of course. However. if you can afford it... backing up your projects to a SSD is the safest method if you plan on loading them into your DAW in 1000 years from now. Granted that the SSD is stored somewhere safe from too much atmospheric interference, of course, like rain, snow, radioactivity, government, your local religious leader...

Cheers!

i plan on adding a 256gb SSD to my DAW next year.. I have a small 60gb for media purposes and it would be excellent for loading Cubase, etc.. I consider seconds lost to hard drive crunching as bad overall performance..

Right now the SAMSUNG 830 series is whomping the competition..

thanks Dux,
exactly.

keyword here is CACHING... using a drive just for caching. even on the newer chipsets this specifically support this (many are flogged as using an smaller SSD for caching) has proven to be mostly marketing BS. even for video editing.

SSD for an OS: as mentioned makes windows snappier for sure, programs open quicker (no preformance gain for audio however)

SSD as an audio drive: plain flat stupid... unless you have a need to do 128 tracks @ 96k then its easier than raid 0 but also small..

SSD for a samples drive: in a word AWESOME

Scott
ADK

When I eventually get round to putting everthing on the new PC I have I think I'll see if I can speed up the old one.

Preferabaly to something like 9.8ms²

HD was a bottrlneck on my rig for sure. Put an 830 128GB SSD in and no more wait. One thing I found was haveing too many SATA devices connected slowed boot down quite a bit, It actually sat there for a while. think it was Bios. Removed drives and it went back up to speed. Next build won't have an internal optical, will have an external when needed. Bought another 830 128GB SSD thinking about raiding the 2. I'm thinking striping 2 SSD's isn't as dangerous as 2 HD's. I also don't think there is a need for partitions or having seperate drives when it comes to SSD's if you can afford a larger one.

The bootup thing is usually just a setting somewhere in the bios. Once I switched over to AHCI mode, along with installing an SSD for the cache/smartresponse, I also had a slow bootup from the raid/ahci checking each drive slowly.

Cant remember off the top of my head what it is though but its no reason not to have drivers in there

At this time I'm runing XP64 nLitened with Dux's ini file and other additions from Seraph@Ryan and MSFN. I was setup for AHCI but not Raid after install. The problem occured when I switched the OS drive for the SSD and then added an external TB HD and an optical to the eSATA. It was fine before adding the HD and optical. Might be that the drives were showing up in the boot options in bios. I can't rember if I removed them from the list or not.

I sort of remember it being some setting in the ahci/raid bios. At least on my mobo once you enable AHCI mode it also enabled the raid bios as well even if you werent using a raid mode. Once that was enabled it would scan the drives but then sit at a screen saying 'looking for operating system' or something of that nature for a few minutes, which is where the bootup lag came in. So if I had to guess the option was somewhere in the raid bios.

So besides looking in the normal bios just follow the bootup sequence and see if theres another place to jump in to an options screen somewhere. It might be similar to your issue since if you only had one drive plugged in there wasnt anywhere else to search

That's so nice to hear that my nlite.ini works with XP64, Throbert! I'm still working with XP32 because the projects and plugins I use simply don't require more memory than 2GB.

Striping two SSD's in a RAID 0 is not nearly as dangerous as striping HDs, yes. These "things" are very reliable. However, I would make a test to see if it's really worth it. I mean, if your SSD reads the data at 500MB/s, uses 3% of CPU for that, and it feels speedy enough, maybe it wouldn't be so good and beneficial to put them into a RAID, but separately, because they do give you 2x speed, but also use double the CPU for that. Think about it, test it. I was considering using RAID once, but I found it more beneficial for audio to have separate drives. I only wish we had this technology available years ago. It's one of the crucial things to make the PC work really quietly, and I'm a quiet computer maniac.

In my experience, of all the SATA devices, optical drives make the booting process a bit slower, since the BIOS recognises them with a bit more lag. That's why I'm considering to put it in an external case, too. why not? I don't use it much anyway.

A good tip for speeding up the booting, SATA devices recognition, actually. If you can, and some BIOSes can, don't leave the option for SATA devices recognition in the BIOS on AUTO, but on manual. However, this option seems to be on its way out, for some reason... I can't do it on my new computer, and all I have is AUTO option.

It's logical that less devices you have on SATA, the boot will be faster. In general, it's not a good idea to have lots of devices of any type in the computer.

Cheers!

Oh just to be clear I wasnt actually using raid in the traditional sense. You have to have raid support enabled in order to use caching/smart response since it will setup its own version of a raid array for the caching