SSD Drive Upgrade-HUGE improvement

[LOCK88]

As my computer gets older (27''iMac 2014), my ProTools sessions seem to be freezing more & more often. I was thinking that I needed a new computer, but decided to get a new Hard Drive and see if that helped. I purchased this external hard drive ( LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 SSD 1TB Portable Hard Drive LAC9000602) https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VS ... UTF8&psc=1 , and it has made all the difference in the world. I am now running my pro tools sessions directly off this new external SSD Drive. My Pro Tools sessions are no longer freezing. Would def recommend these SSD drives if you are having any drive issues.

[markhimley]

Have you seen the new iMac Pros that are coming out in December??? They cost an arm and a leg, but one can dream right? The specs are amazing. I am currently running a homebuilt Hackintosh, but am slowly encountering more and more problems, would love to be able to update to one of these! What really caught my attention was that it can have up to 128 GB ram, and 4 TB SSD with 3 GB/s throughput. These things are monsters


www.apple.com/imac-pro/

[lesmac]

Just wondering whether you need to look into backing up your sessions to another drive [ssd or platter] with regard to SSD's vulnerability with multiple re-writes. They are usually recommended as best for streaming samples and putting your operating system on but I imagine if you keep an eye [ear out] for errors and back up to another drive [or two] you should be a happy camper.

Edit; "4. Shorter lifespan than hard disk drives: An SSD has a limited write cycle. The flash memories of a solid-state drive can only be used for a finite number of writes. An SSD cannot write a single bit of information without first erasing and then rewriting very large blocks of data at one time. As each cell goes through this cycle, it becomes more useless. However, this decaying process does not affect the read capability of the entire SSD. In addition, because of technological advancements, the lifespan of an SSD lasts until the natural consumer-driven product lifecycle of a computer."

From this page
http://www.versiondaily.com/ssd-advanta ... ate-drive/

It looks like it's not a huge issue but it would be nice to know how long 'the natural consumer-driven product lifecycle of a computer' actually is.

[LOCK88]

Thanks for this info Les. looks like an additional backup drive is in order.

[fuzzbox]

I switched to totally SSDs about four years ago. That was expensive. But wow! what difference in boot up and shut down times. I use Samsung Pro series and they have the V-nand technology (or whatever) I read about it at the time. Its a robust and quick way of reading/writing that no other manufacturer does.
I backup (manually) after every session and I clone once a month. So far so good. Clone takes just under an hour, so no biggie. I know that I'm coming into the time of potential failures/disk errors (or I'm in the curve of MTBF; Meantime between Failure ) but I haven't noticed anything yet. As soon as I do I would switched to the cloned version and copy over my recent work. Then I would replace the drive and carry on.