Tip for Cubase Users With Small SSD Space

[braincell]

Maybe you are using a small SSD like I am with incredible speed and a lot of it is filled with your sample library. I have a way now to keep the used space limited

(Requires Logitech G105 Gaming Keyboard $40)


1. Create two shortcuts in Cubase for Remove Unused Media & Empty Trash

(I used "[" and "]" because they aren't used in Cubase key commands)

2. Record this real time Macro in Logitech Gaming Software.

(we will shorten it later so take your time entering keys)


Record this:

delete
Ctrl+P (open and close pool)
[
Enter
]
Enter
Ctrl+P

Now in Logitech Gaming Software, change the time between keys to 1 (this will make it .001 seconds).

Disclaimer: FILES WILL BE PERMANENTLY DELETED SO USE AT OWN RISK

[garyb]

another thing to be aware of is that SSDs can only be written to a very limited number of times.

[braincell]

At the 60 Gig size they are small enough and cheap enough to replace. At ten times the speed, well worth it. I don't write much. If you can't get what you need in 4 takes, you better practice more!

http://techreport.com/review/25320/the- ... 2tb-update

[Mr Arkadin]

another thing to be aware of is that SSDs can only be written to a very limited number of times.

I wasn't aware of this. What does this mean in practice? Don't they behave like regular drives?

I was thinking of getting a new computer with two 500GB SSDs and two 1TB hard drives. I could just put all my libraries on the SSDs (Kontakt, BFD, M-Tron Pro etc.) so I would mstly be reading from them and write to the two hard drives.

[jhulk]

ssd are better for storage and retrieval systems like servers that are just storage back up

but there not good for constant write operations as they only have so many write cycles before failure

that is what makes them good as removable media as a storage device as there quick and dont suffer from fragmentation

so for system drives and that are a lot they are good

but not for audio recording as constant writing then deleting is not good for an ssd

[braincell]

I recommend Kingston SSDNow 60Gb. It has a three year warranty. I tested it up to 500 tracks and it still played back without a flaw in the sound. The larger ones do not last as long. The price if it only lasted through the warranty period would be only about $16 per year! I figure it will last longer than that. Ones who say don't use them are jealous because they can not attain the same performance at that low price. You do not need a large SSD drive because you can move songs to another drive when finished. It is perfect for DAW recording, period. However if $16 a year is too expensive for you, and maybe you make too many mistakes while recording, an option is to do your recording on another drive and mix on SSD or to practice more before recording.

Of course no matter what type or storage media you use, you should *always* backup everything. I use Microsoft Sync Toy. It's free and easy. Use with default setting.

[Bud Weiser]

another thing to be aware of is that SSDs can only be written to a very limited number of times.

I wasn't aware of this. What does this mean in practice? Don't they behave like regular drives?

I was thinking of getting an machine with two 500GB SSDs and two 1TB hard drives. I could just put all my libraries on the SSDs (Kontakt, BFD, M-Tron Pro etc.) so I would mstly be reading from them and write to the two hard drives.

Yes, they don´t behave like regular drives.
SSDs are all about SPEED.

Reliability of SSDs depends on the controller in use (Sandforce or ???), the implementation of the trim feature and the count of write processes over time.
Discussing trim feature here is senseless because it fills pages, so I recommend reading about that feature before deciding for a SSD.
You cannot defragment SSDs, that´s what the trim feature is for and it works good or not so good or worst,- and it works in the background when the system wants it and NOT when you allow.

Up to now, there don´t exist any long time reliability tests of SSDs because there come out new models every few month since the invention of SSDs and that has a reason.
The manufacturers definitely know the weak points of SSDs and try to make ´em better in very short production cycles and it´s very often the controller itself crapping out the SSD.

That said,- small SSDs are totally unacceptable in pro systems because you better fill a SSD w/ data only 50% of it´s capacity at max. or less !
So, when you want to store, as an example, NI Komplete Ultimate 9 to a SSD, which makes sense, you better buy a 480GB, or much better, a 900 GB SSD.
You will make changes to the library,- add edited samples and/or your own presets, add more 3rd party libraries etc.,- so there WILL BE write proceedures.
I also have never seen any Windows system not writing more or less continuously to the system drive.
When I look at my system HDD end of day in OO Defrag,- the system drive is the most fragmented of all partitions/drives in the machine all day ! There IS activity always.

The smallest SSDs which make sense are these beginnig from 256GB.
Look at the specs for sequential read/write and compare small ones vs larger ones,- and the trim feature wants lots of space to work propperly.

Now buying a 256MB SSD for system/data and a really big one for samples,- that´s an investment and is worth to think about how many fast regular drives you can buy for that money.

A regular HDD might die earlier than the SSD depending on the circumstances, but there´s no guarantee your SSD won´t fail before the MTBF.
Any SSD can fail within a fraction of a second, so you need a backup strategy too and when you use tha machine live you want to have backup SSDs not losing speed when replacing a damaged SSD and so on,- it´s all EXPENSIVE..

I´m discussing all this w/ my friend working in a small computer shop building consumer machines as well as industry servers and they also sell customized laptops.
He´s very good in assembling machines and has excellent knowledge of hardware being also a gamer himself.
He built my DAW computer b.t.w. and whe the next one has to be assembled he´ll do again.

My friend, as a gamer, wants fastest machines.
He uses 6 core Sandy/Ivy Bridge E processors on socket 2011 mobos and up to now used a HD controller card and fastest harddrives possible.
Now he really wants SSDs and he says the best you can actually buy from consumer market is the Samsung 840 PRO series (1.5 mio hrs MTBF).
Next step up is the Samsung enterprise series for servers which offer 2 mio. hrs MTBF.

But it´s all not cheap and probably not necessary in a studio environment.
For me, the (SATA II) Samsung F3 and WD Caviar Black drives were fast enough always.
I´ll have at least 2 SATA III (6GB/sec) drives in my next machine and I think this will be even faster.

When touring w/ a computer based live rig, well,- I´d go for SSDs though,- but I´d need the same system twice then anyway,- so it´s all about what the gig pays.

Bud

[jksuperstar]

another thing to be aware of is that SSDs can only be written to a very limited number of times.

I wasn't aware of this. What does this mean in practice? Don't they behave like regular drives?

A mix of drives is a good. I have an SSD with my OS and projects on it, and a HDD for recording and samples. The OS is tweaked to keep all logs and my user folders on the HDD, as Bud says, too.

A Rotating media hard drive will take over a million writes (to each sector). An SSD can take a few thousand. To put that into perspective, a HDD in a heavily used server (say at Google) will last a solid 5+ years. Current Server SSDs have a lifespan of about 3 months. Worse: As technology gets smaller and more dense, the failure rate of SSDs goes WAY UP. Each time you read (not just write!), it effects the life of the SSD. Even worse and measurable now: A 32GB SD card for your camera will actually loose a shocking amount of data over a year, without being used at all, just from temperature changes (back up your photos!). How shocking? In 10 years see how many pictures are still readable Statistics say about 60%.

(I've developed controllers for HDDs, SSDs, and hybrid drives for the past 18 years, and personally keep everything backed up on a HDD).

Best practice: Get an HDD, and split it into two or more partitions (this is good practice on any computer...it improves your seek times as long as you don't read from multiple partitions at the same time). Record only audio streams to particular partitions. If you use samples and other audio at the same time you are recording, it's best to pre-load them into RAM instead of streaming, or have them on separate drives (true for SSDs also), as reads - if they come across an error - will re-read and do drastic measures to return your data correctly, and that can have an impact on performance.

And of course, buy Western Digital

[Mr Arkadin]

So jk do you feel it's OK to have the OS on the SSD? I think Bud was saying that the OS gets written to a lot so the SSD will get used lots of times. I'm not so bothered about a quick OS a boot as once it's done, it's done. I'd rather have quick sample library streaming.

[Bud Weiser]

So jk do you feel it's OK to have the OS on the SSD? I think Bud was saying that the OS gets written to a lot so the SSD will get used lots of times. I'm not so bothered about a quick OS a boot as once it's done, it's done. I'd rather have quick sample library streaming.

Just a note: How much the OS writes to a drive and what depends on usage of the computer too.
Updating applications of all kind is definitely a write process every time something gets updated.
There will be log files and other small file types been written to disk (SSD) and such.
Maybe there are ways to tell the machine where these have to go to,- but I never tried up to now because of using harddisks, not SSDs.
Also,- when buying a 256GB SSD as the smallest (and system drive) because of the performance boost these have over the 60 and 120GB SSDs,- you won´t waste too much space and want some data on that drive too, isn´t it ?
And exactly that user data might change more often, let it be PDF user manuals or presets for VST plugins or the VST plugins-folder itself which content might change by checking out and/or replacing plugins and so on.
Same rules for SCOPE.
When building projects or add devices, modules, presets, update & upgrade stuff,- it´s all write processes.

What the industry wants is you buy expensive SSDs every half a year and use these in mobile consumer computers for the internet and entertainment and s##t.
They don´t really want to make the flash memory stuff reliable because you shall buy frequently and new.

I hate I have flash memory in my Kurzweil PC361 because when I edit stuff sometimes, change parameters in the DSP algo department or FX section and save,- the machine introduces glitches randomly until I switch off and on/ reboot and recall the edited stuff again.
Surprisingly it works then.
I wonder how long my xD cards will survive because I backup my patches on these.

When you run a server company that´s a different story because other advantages compensate for relatively fast failure of SSDs,- smaller formfactor of server cases allow more servers being mounted into one tower and it needs less cooling, consumates less power etc.,- and they make continuous money so swapping SSDs after failure all the time isn´t a prob at all.
They also buy large quantity and have better prices than we have.

As long as I´m unable to do concert touring again and don´t need the mobile stuff urgently I stay w/ the standard harddrives which all run 120+ audio tracks today and w/ SCOPE I don´t need hundreds of VST plugins simultaneously loaded and running, you know.

All the speed and amounts of RAM you only need for the native software.

Actually I also stay w/ Win XP,- at least until may or so,- and since I´ve read here it´s possible to tweak Win7 32Bit (but not XP unfortunally) that way we´re able to use more than 4GB of RAM, I don´t think I will install a 64Bit system too early or at all.

Bud

[garyb]

sure, use the SSD for your C: drive. clone it after a while and replace it when it starts to act up.

[dawman]

In a better scenario for OS+Apps I use an SSD/Mechanical Hybrid since I get the performance of the SSD due to it's large Nand Cache, then the writes are unlimited, and the storage is 500GBs for audio files, midget porn, etc.

Also the write/lifespan has been greatly increased using M.2.NGFF PCI-e SSDs.
Right now there are mostly used in LapTops like MacBooks, Lenovo and Samsung.
But Supermicro has a motherboard where it's M.2 drive can be used as a boot device, it fits right on the board and takes 2 inches of space, and the new Samsungs, ADATAs and other manufacturers have killer little 1TB, down to rather cheap GB per dollar sized choices.
1.8GBps/150k Random reads, is 3 1/2 times the speed of my 3 x OCZ Vector 4's.

But it's thanks to these devices that Braincells idea makes sense for the older, less writable SSDs. I have been at CES all week getting paid to run around on breaks and see the new protocols like SATA Express, etc. This has driven down older SSD designs to less than 80 cents per GB. Smaller models are slower and don't scale as well as the 480-512GB models, but Samsungs EVO and other 840 designs have the new boost technology from yet another software company they swallowed up, and that software can be downloaded and added to many of the old SSD designs, and since everything is made in house, they are ridiculously priced. They still won't get you over the 500+ GB bottleneck of SATA III, but former writes can hit the same speeds as sequential reads, and the important random IOps is over 120k which is what makes our random seeks for sample libraries really fast.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7634/anan ... tuesday-17

I am not following this since I am working there and go to only the booths of interest. But it does cover the technologial advantages Samsung is using with their Storage products.

[jksuperstar]

So jk do you feel it's OK to have the OS on the SSD? I think Bud was saying that the OS gets written to a lot so the SSD will get used lots of times. I'm not so bothered about a quick OS a boot as once it's done, it's done. I'd rather have quick sample library streaming.

I think it's fine...There are tweaks you can make to windows to avoid the constant writes to the same drive the OS is on. That doesn't prevent 100% of writes, but most of them. Windows 8 is better at detecting that you are installing to an SSD, and makes a lot of those tweaks for you during the install.

Here's a great link to start:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/sean ... -ssds-hdds

Jimmy is also right-on for the Hybrid drives (you'll see them called SSHDs very soon)...the drive does the caching for you, optimizing what needs to be cached (and even uses this space to help speed up access to other often used data on the disk, buffering just enough data for the disk to spin to that location (worst case) where the rest of the data is ready to go).

[dawman]

Yes JK, and the worst case is avoided with these 8-16GB NANDs.
I am using the version 2 500GB Momentus XL, which is old tech really, but was a significant boost for load times, and any OS instensive stuff, but is lame for sample streaming.

Mine is a meger 4GBs but I only wanted it to be large enough for a complete OS load, and it's smart algo is really primitive to what I am seeing at CES this week, but I have had this for years now and the technology has come a long way since then.

Here's a different approach where you can use this caching M.2 SATA and use the software and old Mechanical HDDs you have been using for years, or even more SSDs.

http://www.thessdreview.com/daily-news/ ... ware-code/

The hybrid thing is great for larger storage capaity, but Windows 8 with tweaks and a small SSD sounds pretty sweet too.

The booth babes are outstanding this year. Been to 2 private viewings where the Suites are 5 star and staffed with foxy hackers who can type on a QWERTY as fast as my fingers during an electro rendition of Spain by Chick Corea.....

[braincell]

sure, use the SSD for your C: drive. clone it after a while and replace it when it starts to act up.

I don't care about how quickly programs load. I just want to be able to stream and load more samples quickly so using it on the C drive is kind of pointless to me.

[Mr Arkadin]

Half this thread is invisible to you, numpty. It's not all about you, dear.

[hubird]

right.