New IMac with the 256GB solid state drive

[myktyl]

Hey people, I'm looking to acquire a new IMac with plenty of grunt (quad-core 2.93Ghz Intel i7), 8GB ram, and I'm looking at hard drives... now when I've been reading about the VSL collections they've always said "separate drive" So If I get the 2TB HDD, and ALSO the 256GB solid state drive... Which is described below: "iMac also offers an optional 256GB solid-state drive (SSD), which has no moving parts and offers increased drive performance for many operations. The 256GB SSD may be purchased in place of the standard hard drive or in addition to it." I'd run the operating systems and everything else off the 2TB drive, and just put VSL Special Edition on the solid state drive. What do you guys thing about that? Will that do the trick? Also, 8GB ram enough? (4 X 2GB 1333MHz DDR3) and the processor is the top of the current line. I've been a pianist for about 20 years, do you think one of the new Clavinova digital pianos is OK for driving VSL? Or should I go for something more specifically designed for driving software instruments?

[Paul]

Hi myktyl, 

and welcome to the forum community!

In theory, SSD should increase the performance, and provide a more robust streaming and a better polyphony, as far as the drive is concerned, but in practice, we never did any actual tests, as these drives are still on the expensive side.
So it's very hard to make a recommendation here... but I agree that the new iMacs look very tempting. 

I´d like to hear the opinion of others, of course - but this machine might be overkill for "just" the Special Edition. And you might be better off running your OS on the SSD drive, actually. But I´m not an expert in this area, I have to admit...

Regarding pianos: Whichever piano feels right for you is right. Take your time and check out which piano has the best feeling. Some pianos and masterkeyboards offer more options to manipulate factors like the Velocity curve, which might be helpful, but you can also change this in most software as well. 

Hope that helps!

Best,

Paul

[Cyril Blanc]

Hello Paul

Nowdays SSD price are going down.

The SE Plus will stay on a 120 GB SSD drive and a 120 GB SSD drive is costing 300 euro

It will be great if VSL could invest 300 euro to do some test

I am ready to spend a few 100 euro on an SSD but I need to be sure that it is worthing the money I will spend

Thanks in advance

Best

Cyril

[DG]

Cyril, what improvement do you expect to see from using an SSD? With the pre-load buffer fixed in VI, the only improvement is likely to be loading times. I am having no polyphony problems from two standard 7200 drives for the whole cube, so I would have thought that there would be no real advantage to running SE from an SSD, unless you are having problems.

DG 

[Talino]

@myktyl: Concerning the Clavinova, there are no rules, really. Use what is comfortable for you. I have a 7.5-octave full "hammer action" Fatar master keyboard (the SL-880), it has 8 preset velocity curves you can choose from, but I *still* get the best dynamic reponse from my Roland Fantom X6 basic "synth" keyboard. There really isn't any "right" way of driving software instruments, or any instrument for that matter... (plus, if I recall correctly, the Clavinovas have some terrific keyboards built into them).

[mike connelly]

Now that SSD drives are out and getting cheaper and more common, VSL should definitely check them out and should definitely look into adding an option to lower the preload buffer.  With other sample playback plugins, SSD has allowed users to go from a buffer setting somewhere in the middle to the lowest available (and I suspect future versions of the plugs may allow setting it even lower).

When the buffer can be reduced, it can save a ton of memory and load times are very very much faster.  I'm hoping to get one very soon for various libraries.

[Cyril Blanc]

@mike connelly said:

Now that SSD drives are out and getting cheaper and more common, VSL should definitely check them out and should definitely look into adding an option to lower the preload buffer.  With other sample playback plugins, SSD has allowed users to go from a buffer setting somewhere in the middle to the lowest available (and I suspect future versions of the plugs may allow setting it even lower).

When the buffer can be reduced, it can save a ton of memory and load times are very very much faster.  I'm hoping to get one very soon for various libraries.

I just had a chat with Corsair about there SSD :

My Question :

3) If I buy 3 SSD x F64 and make a Raid 0 using my RocketRaid 2322 card what speed can I expect ?

They say :

Technical Support	Depending on the Raid card with Three Force drives you should expect about 750MB a sec read and 700MB write. It is hard to estimate as we do our testing on PC based systems.

WOWWWWWWWW !

We could load our templates in a VERY few minutes

[myktyl]

Woah... raid 0ing 3 SSDs like that will give you enough speed to launch your computer into orbit and hit the next galaxy over before your templates load.

[myktyl]

Thanks for the answers folks. I'm unlikely to expand beyond the SE (though I intend to grab the whole SE)... as anything further would be fantastic, but massive overkill for my needs. The computer will also be used for film post production so I'm thinking it's a decent idea to keep the music side of things stored on that little extra drive. I will try a few different keyboard setups, but I'm happy to stick with my beloved clav. it's good to hear that it'd be fine... and I know that as long as my expression while playing the clav is transferred into the computer, it'll make my job a lot easier.

[Cyril Blanc]

Hello Karel

Did you look to see if it was possible to load each VE of a VE pro server in parallel ?

Best

Cyril

[Cyril Blanc]

@myktyl said:

Woah... raid 0ing 3 SSDs like that will give you enough speed to launch your computer into orbit and hit the next galaxy over before your templates load.

have you been taking forbidden stuff ????? 

LOL

[Errikos]

I'm also interested in the new iMac Quad i7 2.93 (as it supports both Turboboost and Multi-Threading), but I read in fora that Apple's offering SSDs that do not support 'TRIM', i.e. over time they are expected to get sluggish, up to inoperable for professional use. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

[mike connelly]

Even though TRIM isn't supposed to be supported, I haven't read about any mac users seeing decreasing performance.  It's possible something like that is already implemented, or it could be an issue but people aren't noticing much yet.

TRIM is an issue with repeated writing but not reading so it may affect your OS speed but shouldn't make a difference for sample playback.  Just to be safe, one option is to partition the drive (or go for the option of HD plus SSD) - once the samples are on that partition, you won't be doing much if any writing to it.

[Errikos]

Mike do you know whether a SSD should not be filled up more than 80% of its capacity (like a normal drive) because it will slow its performance and stability, or is that not a consideration due to SSD architecture? It's unfortunate that the SSDs offered by Apple merely hold 256Gb.

[mike connelly]

That might be the case for a boot drive (or a drive holding apps or documents that are being edited), but my guess would be that if you are just loading up the drive and then reading from it after that, it seems like getting it pretty full would be just fine.

[Cyril Blanc]

Hello Mike

Did you already had a look to the SSD available ?

Depending of the block size and if it is read sequentially or randomly one could be very good or very bad

Also some are very slow in writing but fast in reading and vice et versa

I remember reading about 4k blocks ?????

So what are the optimum parameter needed for VSL, 

I plan to have 3 x ssd of 64 GB in Raid 0 to put VSL and one ssd of 128 GB with 2 partitions, one for VM and the other one for the project I am working on

Best

Cyril