Phil - Yet another "boogyman" exists in your machine construction: the mere
fact that audio-oriented machines, i.e. DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations)
need to be *as quiet as possible* (of course if you plan to locate the
computer in another room with only the OI/UI in the recording area it's not
such a factor, but still...).  SSDs "no moving parts" operation seems ideal;
the caveat: write times to SSDs generally suck, and the point another lister
made of the fact that SSDs can only be written to so many times
(currently).  A possibility there is to run your OS and DAW app from the
SSD, while "recording" on a remotely (another room) located hard drive (or
in a "silenced" enclosure).  This is way feasible with the application of
ethernet.  Regards, Steve

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Dean Kukral <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> SSD's are not really "hard drives" but a form of memory such as compact
> flash.  As such, they can be accessed and written to much
> faster than regular hard drives because of the decreased latency (seek time
> to find the spot on the rotating disk to read or write).
> But, like compact flash, they have a limited number of times that they can
> be written to the same spot without failure.  (Hundred
> thousand times or more - I don't know about the latest technology.)
>  Manufacturers have a way of moving the written areas around
> (not too unlike a screen saver), so that one lonely spot does not fail
> earlier than the rest.  You are still limited to a much
> smaller number of writes compared to a hard drive.  I am sorry, but I can't
> give you more engineering details - this is just a
> touch-and-go on the topic, as my knowledge is limited.
>
> So, for a  SSD to be useful, it should be used to store information that is
> not frequently overwritten.  I think that storing
> operating system information would be ideal, because I would think that it
> would be relatively permanent.  However, there may be
> small parts that are written over thousands of times a day - you would have
> to ask Microsoft.  :)   It might be better used to store
> large volumes of things such as photographs, music, and video.  For
> example, an iPod might be a good place for using SSD to store
> the recorded material.
>
> I hope this helps a little to make you understand the problems associated
> with SSD.  BTW, regular dynamic memory such as that used
> in ram does not suffer from these restrictions (at least the problems
> require orders of magnitude more accesses), so that RAM
> failure is usually caused by something else.
>
> Dean Kukral
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Phillip Williams" <[log in to unmask]>
>
>
> Hello Listers,
>  I've been looking at the varieties of hard drives and am amazed at
> the difference in price per memory space of the solid state drives.
> I'm wondering if any of you have experience with them and what are the
> advantages to these drives vs. disc drives.
>
>  Would it be beneficial to use one say, for an operating system
> partion or for programs
> and mix it with a less expensive disc drive for larger files? Or are
> the benefits lessened by combining the two types?
>
>  System I'm collecting parts for is based on a dual-core intel with a
> 1gig memory video card for gaming, video and music editing and
> production, some 3-D rendering, animation and auto-cad.
>
>  Interested in your opinions,
> -Phil Williams-
>
>                   Visit our website regularly for FAQs,
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>

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