SSD advice

[Carl G.]

to laptops - power savings, etc). Would like knowledgeable advice. Here are my two choices.

1. SanDisk Extreme PRO-Series Solid State Drive SDSSDXPS-480G-G25

2. Samsung 850 PRO - 512GB - 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD (the 32GB difference is insignificant to me)

Overriding question I have is which one is better for Audio/Video production and rendering?

The Samsung has a nice feature that the Sandisk does not: Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) technology. The Samsung drive includes an AES-256-bit hardware-based, full disk encryption engine that secures your data without the performance loss often experienced with software-based encryption. However, my question is: Is that encryption going on for everything that is written to the drive? If so, wouldn't that constant encryption be a potential cause of problems for audio/video production and rendering?

Both carry a 10 year warranty, but the Samsung Pro has almost double the Lifetime Writes before failure: 150TB vs 80 for the SandDisk
(but I'm concerned about the encryption load messing up production or other needs)

Thoughts?

[RBIngraham]

I have several systems that use the Samsung SSD units and they have all worked very well. Most of mine are the Evo units however, so not sure what the differences are with the Pro. They are much faster than any spinning drives I've had.

I have used these in two of my production tower systems for at least a couple of years now and the system drive in my laptop/DAW has also been SSD for a couple of years now. I recently swapped the data drive in the laptop DAW over to an SSD as well.

So far no issues. And this is across a wide range of OS. Win XP, 7 and 8/10. (the Win 8 machine I recently updated to 10)

[Dave Labrecque]

RBI -- what's the current thinking/situation with sectors going bad or lost data or whatever used to happen with SSDs? I never quite understood it. Still a thing? Good for boot drive? Good for data/audio? What's the word?

[RBIngraham]

I'm not an expert on them really. But it's my understanding that all SSD have a limited number of write cycles to each sector (or whatever the technical term would be) of the drive. That's a physical limitation of the technology used to make them. So eventually you write to sectors and they won't allow you to erase and rewrite to them again.

As I understand you won't necessarily lose data but you lose the ability to write new data to that sector. Of course if you delete a file that uses that sector then that sector just gets marked bad and will never be used again. So over time you'll lose drive capacity. The more you erase files and write new ones (or update the same file) the faster that process happens. But if you read up on it I think you'll find it's A LOT of write cycles. I don't know numbers off the top of my head, but it will take quite some time for them to wear out.

The other issue with SSD has to do with the way they write their data vs a traditional hard drive. I found this that explains it far better than I could have...
http://www.buildcomputers.net/trim-support.html

Short version... you want TRIM to optimize the way files get deleted. Win 7 and later have that built into the OS. So if you're using XP or Vista, you won't have that. My Samsungs shipped with a utility called Magician, which I have installed on all my machines. But on the XP machine I have to run by hand a routine that essentially does the same thing as TRIM. I just run that after every production I use that machine on is finished. (it's a production computer so it boots up for each show, does it thing and then we shut it back off again, so except during technical rehearsals things are largely unchanged on these machines)

I first used them for boot drives so they just had the OS and applications on them. (they are expensive after all and not long ago were very pricey) That makes your system boot up a lot faster and updates to software or installation of new software goes A LOT faster. On my production computers, they typically only have the one drive so it worked well for data as well.

On my laptop/DAW I had a 2nd data drive that was a spinning drive as well as the SSD boot drive. I've swapped that not too long ago to an SSD as well. I can't say if it allowed for more tracks or not really. I typically am not dealing with tons of tracks of recorded data or using it to record a lot of tracks. Most of my work involves a lot of plug-ins manipulating a modest number of tracks. So the SSD doesn't really make much difference for that. I made the switch because it made the laptop lighter and except for the cooling fan it's now silent and no moving parts except that fan. So when it's not working too hard the fan will be off (or maybe it's just spinning really slowly.. hard to say..) and this machine is dead quiet.

Video folks have used SSDs for quite some time now since they need the data throughput performance. To me they are good for either boot or data and as I am moving my stuff around I appreciate anything that saves a few pounds here or there.

Like anything else I don't trust them to be 100% reliable. I back up my data and I have images of the OS drives for the system drives. But this is true of any hard drive, memory, optical media... etc.. None are 100%. So back up your **** and as I believe I've said before, keep at least 3 copies of anything that is truly important using at least two different formats. Yeah I don't do that as well as I should either. Does anyone? Most of my stuff is backed up to spinning hard drives. But if it's really important I have it on one or two hard drives and a back up on optical media as well. For me that's only a handful of theatre shows that are either unique shows or a sound design I think will be used over and over again or has that potential. The rest I save in one or two places but if I lost that data it wouldn't be the end of days. If you really want to be anal one of the back ups should be off site from where you store the others.

That's my take. Don't quote me on the intricacies of the SSD technology. But there is plenty of reading if you want to google it. But my experience with them is good and none have failed me yet. When I intially went down that path I spoke to one of the folks I regularly talk to at my local Microcenter. He told me they have very few returns with the Samsungs and to the best of my knowledge that is still true. So that is why I went that route and stuck to it.

[Carl G.]

Nice link RBI, thanks.

[Richard Rupert]

Just muddyin' up the waters here fellas; I have no experience with this brand. Their warranty appears to be three years. Certainly not as good as 10. The price is good (if you don't lose your data, of course).

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...gn=3WWEBEML188