Solid State Drive
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Last night I installed a solid state drive in my PC and I migrated the
drive contents over to it. Wow! It sure makes a difference in the way programs open and so far, rendering in LO seems to be substantially faster. I think I'll be replacing my second hard drive with another one of these things. -
That's good to hear.
What size is it?
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Great aren't they - I like to have a little break from working now and then - set a big file transfer going - and then listen to the silence!
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@rich o brien said:
That's good to hear.
What size is it?
120Gb. I should have gotten the 180Gb but it was another $100.
Trog, I don't think it'll change things for file transfers much but it's nice not to have such a long wait during boot up or while opening a program. SketchUp still take a little time to load all the plugins but it is faster than before.
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I mostly got an SSD for my amateur music production - initially because of the excellent streaming performance for audio tracks and samples.
But the biggest boon has been the ability to record acoustic instruments while sat at my PC - together with big slow cooling fans, it means I have a full power desktop machine that is virtually silent. And being able to hear the birds singing outside during those long SU modelling sessions is marvellous! -
I hadn't thought about audio and write times. I imagine video would be better, too. I wonder if I will get better screen captures.
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As with all things PC, it all depends where the 'weakest link in the chain' is.
In Adobe Premier, I have seen some marginal improvements - mostly in the responsiveness of the controls (presumably because less buffering is needed), and rendering times (faster access to 'source' files and virtual memory). But the gains I've seen are pretty small, as it is often the computation of the frames that really stresses the system.
For screen captures, I wouldn't expect huge gains either, as the 'bottleneck' is most likely the video codec itself. As with all compression, reducing the file size involves fiendishly complex maths to get as much 'squeeze' as possible with minimum side effects - writing the resulting frames to disk is relatively 'low demand' in comparison.
The gains when audio mixing and using 'virtual samplers' is much more significant because it is common to have dozens of files all being 'randomly' accessed simultaneously in real-time - and it is the dramatic reduction in 'seek' times when jumping from file to file that is the SSD's biggest advantage (hence the big reduction in boot up times as Windows accesses those 100s of dll's and startup 'services'). -
I guess some questions I would have would deal with longevity and reliability. SSD's have come along way in a relatively short time.
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I guess we'll see. I haven't reformatted the old hard drive yet so it could be returned to service without too much trouble.
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