SSD Drives Update: ioSAN New HD Technology

[braincell]

Is anyone in here using an SSD drive for making music? I hear the speed is crazy fast. All the ones I have found are for laptops but there are enclosures which would allow you to use use it in a desktop.

[darkrezin]

Actually in all the reviews I've seen so far the speed increase is not huge. The main advantage I can see for SSD's is that they are silent. Possibly they use less power too. There are 2 types of SSD - MLC and SLC (multilayer and single layer)... SLC has much longer write-lifetime but is obviously more expensive. Here's some info:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=223173

[Neutron]

I like the idea but i do not think its worth the premium yet.
its just chips, so the price is bound to drop.

[braincell]

How about this?

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=459

[garyb]

good drive.

[Throttler]

the price will drop rapidly in the next few months with the 256 and 512 storming the market.
people, ssd drives are the solution to all the resonant noise coming from multiple hard drives in full towers.

[astroman]

the 'problem' with SSD drives is that it's become a buzzword
all and everything without a rotating plattern is called 'SSD' today
Aside from the different (memory)cell types, the embedded interfaces to the IDE or SATA bus vary to an almost unbelievable degree.
That enventually leaves you comparing apples with oranges...
I have a 4GB 2.5" thingy in my notebook for noise's sake and it fact it is (expactably) fast when booting Windoze, the typical stuff where many small files require lots of movement of the drive head.
Same with SFP loading from a 1GB IDE plug - fairly outdated today, but it has been a reliable performer for several years.
When it was released I paid 149 Euro, recently I aquired one for 19
I wouldn't expect any huge advantage in writing coninuous portions of audio data.
Recently some SSD disks have been reported to have severe problems in handling massive write requests in server applications.
After all it's just the lower noise level that makes me stick with that stuff. Even if I have to pay a fortune...

cheers, Tom

[garyb]

...aaaannnd magnetic storage is almost bulletproof. 40 year old tapes still play and data from bad drives can be recovered.. electronic storage is not so bulletproof...

[MD69]

I looked for sopme SSD too.
Current problem (the one presented by Astroman) is linked to the SSD controler which downgrade the performance when 25% of IO are randoms. Seagate is investing for designing a new controler to solve this.
Otherwise, in order to maintain a steady sustain througput a cache memory of 8Mb is necessary.
cheers

[JoeKa]

when I last read a review about ssdrives -being curious about that technology for years myself- their comparison to magnetic hdds wasn't all that great as people might have expected. noise and mechanical stability were pretty much the only fields in which ssds had a clear advantage over hdds, but even power consumption was not better, especially in write cycles. ssd write speed varied much more than the hdds with the various tests, and when it comes to price/performance ratio, the winner would clearly be the hdd. that, paired with some extra ram for caching, was able to equal or beat the ssd in as good as any given performance test and at a fraction of the cost.
in the end, I decided to fit two of these sweet WD velociraptors (such as linked above) in my daw recently, and they perform brilliantly, and they're nicely silent, too. the air conditioning in my studio is clearly noisier. ok, they are expensive when compared to "normal" hdds, but far below a similar amount of storage in ssd, and for the multitracking purpose I'd buy them again anytime. good stuff.
give ssd technology another 5 years to turn into something reliable and economic.

[braincell]

I think a few of those WD drives in a RAID 0 array would be best. I will start with one in an external enclosure and see how that does.

[Neutron]

one day you will have a thing like a thumb drive, but really fast. internal storage may become a thing of the past.

[braincell]

There is a dramatic new development on the horizon called ioSAN by a company named Fusion-io. It uses PCIe. Read this:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2340473,00.asp

Yes the cost will be $1,000 but it will come down.

[valis]

Are you not getting enough speeds from your HD's briancell? Raid 0 isn't terribly fault tolerant (lose 1 drive and data from both drives goes bye bye).

You can actually build a decent NAS device yourself, all you need is to buy a HD cage with integrated controller that supports gigabit. The advantage there is having the storage accessible to your entire network, but to use it as a dedicate RAID for your DAW you'd want it to be connected only to a second gigabit port, which makes an external eSATA RAID solution seem more sensible (and it will perform better). But I can't imagine anyone really needing a RAID array unless you're doing extremely high track counts at higher samplerates, or doing a lot of video work.

ioSAN looks to me like a fancy name for a network attached storage device with SSD's inside aimed at datacenters. Having a NAS device that's preboxed with SSD's seems like it's targeted at IT staff that doesn't have the budget for rolling their own gear. SSD's are actually in use by MANY datacenters for insanely expensive RAID arrays, but those drives & controllers make even the consumer oriented SSD's seem like cheap toys.

Another important consideration when moving to RAID, is having a true raid controller with onboard cache (512MB-2GB preferred) with a battery backup. When you use RAID you have to disable write caching, so that data is written to the array immediately. This avoids having windows do a delayed write keeping some data in RAM, as any system failure WILL corrupt the array's filestructure. So performance with write caching off is HORRIBLE, with write speeds will dropping to like 30MB/s even with a RAID 6 or 1+0. Hence the need for the cache on the controller itself (write speeds shoot back up) and the battery backup to insure data integrity when there's a system failure; controllers with cache+battery are smart enough to write out their cache when they come back online, keeping your RAID system intact. The only cause for failure here is losing the controller itself, or a bad block on multiple drives at once (when a bad block occurs on one drive the array runs in 'degraded' mode, a second drive with a bad block will cause data loss if the RAID array hasn't been rebuilt and the drive was part of the same array as the first drive).

If you want to move to RAID, you have to be aware that your stripe size (and the chunk size within the stripe) will greatly impact performance. And it's important to align the OS's formatting to the stripe size as well.

MOST IMPORTANT is to know what you're designing your storage subsystem for:

• Audio Recording : SATA RAID 5 using 64K chunk IF your track counts are high enough to require more than individual drives can deliver
• Office Fileserver : RAID 5 using 64K chunk size with same io client page size
• OLTP database : SATA RAID 1 for the logs, SATA RAID 5 with same chunk size than db page size, SSD RAID 5 on those rare high concurrency tablespaces >4GB
• Video editing : RAID 5 using 64K chunk size with same io client page size
• Gaming : Raid 0 SSD using 64K chunk size with same io client page size
• Laptop used for general use : single SSD if the machine can handle the ADDITIONAL POWER DRAW with its battery (SSDs do NOT lower battery life right now, especially under Vista!)

Also note that in every case a proper BACKUP solution is still required. RAID is for *high availability* (uptime) and performance, NOT for backup purposes.

[dawman]

A few guys I know bought the X series from Intel for streaming audio and the sheer amount of heat, and poor write times caused them to use the SSD's as O.S. + Apps.
They do seem to allow faster boot times and are a perfect solution for silent operation, but they get extremely hot when used as a streamer.
I will stick w/ a stack of single platter Raptors even though the VelociRaptor is a superior drive. My 150's and even the ancient WD360 are plenty fast for audio.
Any HDD w/ a 16MB Cache even at 7200k speeds is fine.
For streaming several Giant Romplers in real time one can have 3 x Velociraptors w/o RAID in a small ventilated enclosure, and for some strange reason if that isn't sufficient, RAID 3 is what most audio/video streamer geeks use.
The reason for RAID 3 is because of the streaming optimizations and fast rebuild time.
Rebuild times are a factor many overlook until they have a drive failure.
For example the " free matrix " RAID on Intel motherboards is a joke. It eats resources just to use in a basic RAID 1 config, and if you have a simple failure, there's no possible way the CPU can continue performing the same load it's accustomed to using during the rebuild.
It's only good for guys who don't want their data lost. But it's a lame RAID solution IMHO if it can't allow the work to be finished while doing a rebuild.
Fusion I/O actually is what the Military has used for years, and is now becoming a server farm favorite. As usual we will see it available in the consumer market once everyone else has earned their market share first.

[braincell]

"Fusion-io's technology is extremely useful to many different applications"

- The Woz

Streaming audio uses the hard drive a lot. I play piano faster than the human eye can see. I do video editing and possibly at 96 kHz samples in the future.

Only Raid 0 improves performance.

[dawman]

"Fusion-io's technology is extremely useful to many different applications"

- The Woz

Streaming audio uses the hard drive a lot. I play piano faster than the human eye can see. I do video editing and possibly at 96 kHz samples in the future.

Only Raid 0 improves performance.

Then you would like RAID 3.
It is RAID 0 + RAID 5.
It should keep up w/ your chops.

[garyb]

streaming audio does not require raid. video might...

[ReD_MuZe]

i havent been needing more cpu power or memory or HD speed for 4 years now. i produce daily with 40 +- tracks for the big orchestral works and less for the pop works. i'm baffled by the need for speed. don't you have enough?

i mean how many channels do you need playing at once?

[garyb]

as i consider it, streaming sample libraries seem to be extremely inefficient in the way that the data pipeline is used. maybe more speed is needed with those libraries...