32 Gb Flash drive for samples?

[JesseJ]

With no moving parts, SanDisk SSD does not need to spin up into action or to seek files in the way that conventional hard disk drives do - enabling SanDisk SSD to work much faster. SanDisk SSD UATA 5000 achieves a sustained read rate of 62-megabyte (MB)*/sec and a random read rate of 7000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer – more than 100 times faster than any hard disk drive.

http://www.sandisk.com/Oem/Default.aspx?CatID=1478

At ~600$ / 460€ that would make a nice drive to trigger samples from?

[cajonezzz]

sounds killer. I want one.

[taturana]

it looks cool... i''lll wait until they get bigger faster and cheaper...

does anybody know about the reliability for data storage... it seem flash drives aren't really that reliable from what i heard... but who knows...

[JesseJ]

Originally Posted by taturana

it looks cool... i''lll wait until they get bigger faster and cheaper...

does anybody know about the reliability for data storage... it seem flash drives aren't really that reliable from what i heard... but who knows...

They are faster right now. Faster than harddrives. Bigger? Do you use more than 32Gb of samples on any project?? You could fit the a garritan ochestra + all spectrasonic products + Kore + dfh superior and than some on a drive like that and reduce both loading times and sample playback.. all for a mere 600$ upgrade. + some IR responses...

According to SanDisk, the SSD UATA 5000 is rated at "two million hours mean time between failure (MTBF)"

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070104-8555.html


That unreliability thing is a relic from the past... they used to be unreliable in 1996. Now they are a lot more reliable than a drive with moving parts. Ofcourse backups is what makes things reliable.

Not even to mention how slow 5400rpm drives are on laptops.. useless...

[AMIEL]

how can u connect it to a Mac Pro? have a USB..Firewire bay or something?

[JesseJ]

Originally Posted by AMIEL

how can u connect it to a Mac Pro? have a USB..Firewire bay or something?

It is an UATA drive. So whatever you would do with a normal UATA drive I think.

[cajonezzz]

Originally Posted by JesseJ

It is an UATA drive. So whatever you would do with a normal UATA drive I think.

which is what exactly? is this for a pcmia slot?

[JesseJ]

Originally Posted by cajonezzz

which is what exactly? is this for a pcmia slot?

You can read up on the ATAs here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UATA

This could also shed some light on the whole deal albeit a tad outdated info:
http://www.insanely-great.com/features/020121.html

Basicly, that is the connector inside your mac by which your HD is connected.


I would like to see some dicussion and ideas on how we could utilize this 32Gb Flash drive!

First I thought I would just add one as an extra drive to store sample data on, but then I started thinking about how much faster 100x is How much faster the OS (I work on both Mac/PC) would load, how much faster apps would load, how much faster everything would work. For 600$ per piece you could add one for sample data and one for a 'work' drive.

I have done some tests with RAM drives (mount a drive in your memeory) many times in the past, but I never really started using them. But the possibilities of this 32Gb thingy really excites me.

[taturana]

Originally Posted by JesseJ

They are faster right now. Faster than harddrives. Bigger? Do you use more than 32Gb of samples on any project?? You could fit the a garritan ochestra + all spectrasonic products + Kore + dfh superior and than some on a drive like that and reduce both loading times and sample playback.. all for a mere 600$ upgrade. + some IR responses...

it does look very useful .. i wish it came in 200gb sizes.. so i could replace all my hard disks with stuff like that.. but that's wishful thinking... also i think of using something like that for my daw files and in that case 32gb maybe small... you know how disk space goes... there's never enough space... and we always seem to fill up whatever space we got... but being an uata drive it's a lot faster than the usb based flash drives i have... and that's really cool.

i remember my first pcxt with its "huge" 20MB drive and "amazing" 640K Ram memory... i thought it would never fill up... how wrong could i be....


still i'd love to get one...

[JesseJ]

Originally Posted by taturana

i remember my first pcxt with its "huge" 20MB drive and "amazing" 640K Ram memory... i thought it would never fill up... how wrong could i be...

Yeah true. I remember working all summer picking strawberries to get the 32Kb memory expansion module for my Spectravideo... but yeah anyways ...

We all know they are getting faster and bigger, but at some point things get 'good enough' and I think this 32Gb flashdrive is just that. enough. 16gb would bee too small for me... and what I am considering it to be enogh for, is for keeping sample libraries on.

Ofcourse I would be glad to have an 500 tera flash drive that would not only be fast and have low power consumption, but actually generate power for a small village while producing cold beer that could constantly be tapped out from a slot in my tooth implant. But that is the future. An the furute will come.

[Bassmankr]

I think what is interesting with these type of drives is their low latency but their sustained speed of 60mb is the same or even slower than a hard drive. If you hook up the drive through your hard drive contoller, the speed will also be limited by that. These are something to watch but due to cost per gig of storage I don't think they will catch up to standard drives. By the time they get bigger/faster/cheaper so will hard drives so who knows if they will ever be worth it. Right now $500 will buy you another cheapo sample farm box instead of just one drive. I would still keep an eye on them for the future as the ipod market is going to push these to bigger capacity and much lower pricing.

[JesseJ]

Originally Posted by Bassmankr

I think what is interesting with these type of drives is their low latency but their sustained speed of 60mb is the same or even slower than a hard drive.

That's true. My 320Gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 I am using for my sample drive right now has an 78 MB/s maximum sustained data transfer rate. However I have put the mission critical samles on the outer rim, so It should be as fast as possible (afap?)...

How many simultanious 44.1 24-bit stereo samples can you fit in a 50Mbps stream? (let's leave some overhead)?

[dkatz42]

Originally Posted by JesseJ

How many simultanious 44.1 24-bit stereo samples can you fit in a 50Mbps stream? (let's leave some overhead)?

40+ streams at full rate.

For DAW usage, the continuous streaming rate of disk drives is pretty meaningless, as the rotational latency and seek/settling time overwhelm everything else, particularly as the track count goes up. Presumably a flash drive has negligible "seek" overhead and you'll be able to actually make better use of that max rate.

Flash is generally much slower to write to than to read from, which doesn't make it very feasible as a recording medium. What the computer-based recording industry needs is mass storage with fast read/write and no seek overhead; disk drives are the limiting factor in track count once the computer itself is fast enough (and the current generation seems to be.)

[JesseJ]

Update:

128GB Solid State Drive Sees the Light of Day

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/periphera...day-231693.php

[Nerve Nickels]

Nice...

[Nerve Nickels]

Pricey, but it continues....


http://www.ministryoftech.com/2007/0...is-new-record/

[WidgetNinja]

With no moving parts, SanDisk SSD does not need to spin up into action or to seek files in the way that conventional hard disk drives do - enabling SanDisk SSD to work much faster. SanDisk SSD UATA 5000 achieves a sustained read rate of 62-megabyte (MB)*/sec and a random read rate of 7000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer – more than 100 times faster than any hard disk drive.

These performance figures boost system performance. For instance, SanDisk SSD UATA 5000 can boot Microsoft Windows® Vista™ Enterprise on a laptop in as little as 35 seconds. SanDisk SSD achieves an average file access rate of 0.12 milliseconds.** On Windows Experience Index for Microsoft® Vista™, SanDisk SSD scores 5.4 out of a total 5.9, whereas a hard disk drive scores 3.7 on the same test inside the same laptop.***

OK, these aren't good stats. Booting Vista, I have it beat. Without RAID, I equal the Vista experience mark. With RAID, I can equal, maybe beat, the sustained I/O.
The only really cool benchmark is the random I/O, but it's on a very, very small piece of data, so I don't know if that will translate to sample libraries or not.

[Nerve Nickels]

yeah, I don't fully understand what you're saying...I guess I just want a better laptop drive: less heat, and a longer battery life...

what about this ?

lexar expresscard ssd

anygood?