Hi guys, I'm in need for a new storage device for my samples - I'm producing 100% in the box so I have heavy use of samples and synths.

I would like to ask your opinion about it - are SSD's like samsung 960 evo/pro
safe enough for it? I remember SSD's are not ideal for intensive writing and I would hate it to crap out after 2 months and lose all my sample collection because I wrote too many times on it.

Any opinions?

Given SSD's have no moving parts I feel a lot more warm and fuzzy using one than a mechanical drive. The Samsungs which I also have are highly regarded.

Besides neither option should remove regular and thorough backing up.

Be sensible and you'll be fine.

Good modern SSDs can do a LOT of writes without problems. Eg 2 PETABYTES+ in this test.
The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead - The Tech Report - Page 1

Any kind of drive will wear out or fail eventually so always make sure you have a backup in any case.

Another thing I like about SSD is the silence.

I personally like the warm analog sound from a standard hard drive

SSD all the way. You'll want to backup your data for safety, but you'd want to that regardless of the primary media type.

i use 2 SSD's for Samples .. so yes .. mine are Crucial 550's

I find that the floppy disk has a more smiley eq curve.

Agreed. The 5.25" had more surface area than the 3.5", so more analog per square inch.

Punch cards had more resonance and a more confident soundstage.

C'mon guys, nothing beats TAPE:

Using a 2TB Samsung EVO for samples here. Works awesome....so far.

SSDs only wear out when they're written to over and over (it takes years). If it's a sample drive then you'd just be setting it and streaming from it. So it wouldn't even apply to what you're using it for.

I've been all SSD for about four years now, for both sample storage as well as project and audio drives. At first I was using some of the OWC drives because they were first out of the gate with 1tb (actually 960gb) capacities, and I have four of those in my old silver Mac Pro 12-core tower.

When I moved to the Mac Pro cylinders I got a pair of the BlackMagic MultiDock v2 units, and they're filled with Samsung 850 drives - at the moment it's six 2tb 850 Pro drives and two of the 4tb 850 Evo drives, since the Pro series is not available in 4tb capacity yet. The speeds of the Pro vs Evo drives are basically the same - but they do use slightly different underlying technologies that, in theory at least, make the Pro series more durable in terms of total amount of data writes before failure. I believe the warranty on Evo drives is three years while Pro drives is five years? Not sure, but never had to make a warranty claim, so... check their website.

If you want single external drives, the Samsung T3 drives absolutely rock, are ridiculously small, connect via USB-C to any computer with Thunderbolt or USB jacks of any flavor, and are basically an 850 Evo drive in an external box that's half the size of an iPhone. They come in sizes up to 2tb and are priced about the same as the "bare" 2.5" SATA versions that I use in the MultiDocks. My wife has a pair of the 2tb T3 drives on her iMac and they are great.

In practice, you'd have to be basically filling the entire drive, wiping it, and re-filling it every day for years before you'd get anywhere near the limits of the drive's durability in terms of write cycles. In normal use, a drive used for sample storage will be 90% reads and only 10% writes, or something like that. My 4tb Kontakt library drives get big chunks of data written to them only when I've just bought and downloaded a new library, or in tiny amounts when I edit and re-save a Kontakt Instrument file.

My use cycles on the "raw samples" drive that I use for loops and other stuff that gets dealt with in Ableton might see a little bit more writing, with Ableton constantly writing those tiny little ".asd" files, as well as me bouncing, processing, etc. on the audio files, but still... it's a tiny fraction of the total durability of the drives.

The growth in mechanical hard drive capacities has slowed somewhat - a few years ago it seemed that every six months the drives were twice the capacities for the same price, so I wound up buying bigger drives LONG before I "wore out" the older, smaller ones. With the rapid growth in the SSD market, it's sort of that same situation now - you might buy a 1tb drive today and in a year's time the 2tb drives will be the same price - plus you'll have filled that 1tb drive, so you'll probably be upgrading to a larger size LONG before you get anywhere near the durability of the drives.

Just be sure to always keep current backups - I use mechanical drives for this since they're so cheap by comparison: for $600 you can get a 10tb (!!!) spinning drive that will hold all the data from five 2tb SSDs that cost a total of $3,700 (!!!). When an SSD dies, it just goes away instantly and completely (so I've heard) and no "drive savers" data recovery service can get a single file back from oblivion. So back up.

These days I go with Samsung drives exclusively, since they have the largest manufacturing capacity, the most experience, and the highest number of drives out in the field by a large margin. They are just owning the market lately. Some other manufacturer's drives might have slightly lower prices or slightly higher speeds, but Samsung is "the market leader" and they're ahead of the curve in terms of pushing new technology for the memory chips etc. They're stable and reliable. I have had zero failures across more than a dozen Samsung SSD drives in the last few years. I do not baby them, use third-party "trim enabler" software, or do anything other than format them with the default settings in the MacOS Disc Utility software - and then I beat on them mercilessly with no regard for "oooh I better be careful about how much data I write".

The water's fine, come on in! Just don't go for the el-cheapo drives and make backups.

just moved the other 50% of my samples to SSD. IT'S SOOOOO QUITE NOW, DON'T HAVE TO SHOUT OVER A GRINDING, SPINNING DISC! Now I can speak normally.

Except if you bought a Samsung EVO 840 that slowed down it's read speed to slower than a 1980's Atari 20Mb hard drive!

It was a Samsung firmware bug.

I got it swapped out for an 840 Pro.

Apparently if you buy a Samsung drive make sure it's an MLC and not a TLC based drive.

Guys, I got a question about that: if I use an external SSD through USB-C in my notebook which has a 2tb 5200RPM, the internal HD will influence the speed of writing/reading speed? SSD is pretty fast if you compare to a 5200rpm HDD. I don't wanna lose my warranty, so I wanna use an external device like a SAMSUNG T3 or even to mount an external case with a SSD M2.

I moved my sample libraries over to a couple SanDisk SSDs last year and it's been amazing!

I also installed my OS on a SanDisk SSD [on my desktop PC]. Unfortunately, I've lost two of them to power failures. First, a blackout while I was in the middle of mixing a track and then, a month later, a brownout. Both times the OS SSDs gave up the ghost. (note: PC was plugged into a Furman Power Factor AC Filter; SSD drive was the only component to fail.)

SanDisk replaced both of them but there's no getting back all the time I lost reinstalling windows and all my plugins. Now my OS is on an SSHD hybrid drive and my boot time and overall performance feels about the same.

That said, converting my OS drive to an SSD in my ten year old laptop gave it a brand new lease on life. It's been functioning perfectly well for over a year.

First a little terminology to keep you comfortable and confident:
USB-C is a connector type. It supports both USB and Thunderbolt depending on the chips/circuits that are inside the computer.

With that out of the way, *no*, the USB data path is independent of the SATA data path that is running your internal spinning HDD, so they don't affect one another and have no warranty implications.

If your USB-C connector can run USB 3.1 gen-1 or gen-2 to a Samsung T3, then you'll have a wonderful high performance experience with that combination.

In a tangentially unrelated, but important issue brought up by the appender after you; an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) is essential to a happy SSD. A laptop natively provides that function with its internal battery. A desktop does not, and therefore a UPS is essential. A power filter or surge protector is not enough.

That's because a power-related data issue with an SSD is generally a disaster with no recovery of data possible. That's why some enterprise-grade SSD's have large-value capacitors embedded inside to keep them going until they finish writing, and then gracefully stop the controller. Keep a backup and your world will be happier.

everything should be backed up regardless of drive technology. i have two copies of most things— cloud and a local 4tb spinning disk. i am partial to samsung as well.

I prefer tape for data storage, if possible with tube and transformer

Jumping in on this I have a new query that just emerged, the condensed version is as follows:

I have a dying late 2011 MacBook Pro, for which I fitted a 1TB SSD from Crucial last year.

I now have a 2015 MBP on the way (found a great deal on a brand new one on ebay) and realize the internal SSD I got for the previous machine does not work with these, as they use PCIe module SSD drives. Thus, I would like to use it as an external SSD.

My question is, what would be the best enclosure to get to use for it?
I'm a bit foggy in terms of speed loss if going from a SSD to a USB port, not sure if I understand if this would defeat - if only slightly - the high performance of the SSD or does it not make one bit of a difference?

Seeing that there really are only two enclosure options - that being either SATA to SSD or Thunderbolt connections - I'm tempted to steer towards the latter, but would the former be just as good?

Thanks for any advice!

SSDs can do plenty of writes. Just don't buy a cheap one and make sure you get one with enough capacity where it's not full most of the time. When it's almost full performance will go down and the life of the drive will shorten faster.

Good SSDs are ~550MB/sec give or take. Pretty sure USB3 can handle that bandwidth. Modern NVME SSD drives are typically way faster and would require Thunderbolt drive/chassis or being installed onto the motherboard if it supports it.

I'm not sure what the 2015 MBP uses for a drive (normal NVME M.2 or something else). I think the 2013 used a custom Samsung drive which is very pricey so if you do want to swap the internal for one of comparable speed, do a web search or contact a repair shop to find out the specific type of drive that is needed.

Man, thanks a lot for that. I just figure out that my USB-C port is a USB 3.1 gen1, I saw some reviews and T3 looks insane to me since has anything with the internal hdd. But what do you think about I wrote, is it worth to "make" a portable SSD using a 3.1 case + M2 SSD or just get a T3 instead?

Hey thanks for the reply.

I'm not looking for a drive, I'm looking for what kind of enclosure would give me a better performance for the drive I already have, the once internal 1TB SSD I had in my old MBP. The stock SSD that comes with this particular 2015 MBP is the ubiquitous 256 GB, which will be quite a throwback coming from using a 1TB internal but it's cool, I can adapt and make good use of the external one for samples and sessions.

There are ways to swap the internal SSD on these 2013-2015, I did a search and it looks like there are, again, only two options. The Aura SSD from OWC, though I read bad reviews about it heating up quickly and being not nearly as snappy as the Samsung one that Apple uses. You can also buy one of those on Amazon, but they are about double the price of the OWC (about $800-900 for the 1TB). So I'll just stick with the internal 256GB for now and deal with it.

As for what enclosure to get, I suppose I'll go with SATA->Thunderbolt.

An external SATA enclosure attached to USB 3.1 gen-1 (5 Gbits/sec) will yield a ceiling of ~430 Mbytes/sec throughput. Although that's not the perfect full 550 Mbytes/sec of native 6 Gbits/sec SATA, it's close enough...and mighty cost-effective.

Take a look at the 3rd article in my series "Homemade Hybrid Hard Drives" for some perspective on this and related issues. The link to the collection of articles is in my signature.

Thunderbolt or USB3 enclosure should both provide enough bandwidth for an SSD drive as long as you can plug the drive into the enclosure—if it supports 2.5" SSD form factor. Just double check the enclosure has a high enough read/write spec.

Yeah OWC one seems to suck for speed. I haven't seen any enclosures or chassis that support the full 3.5GB/sec NVME speeds for Mac. Best ones seem to do 2/3 the speed using TB3. Guessing it's tied to the limitations of the tech/Intel boards they use. I haven't found a clear answer as to the why for the speed limitation for external devices using TB3.

I now have 8.5 Terrabytes of SSDs in my new PC build and have been using 100% SSDs in my DAW for about 5 years now. Cross my fingers, I haven’t had a single SSD issue in all that time. I use Samsung SSDs.

Man, are you using internal or external SSD? T3 or did you mount it using a case?

Internal:

M.2 500 gig SSD
2x 2 TB SSD's
4x 1 TB SSD's

As we can see in any endurance test the Samsung have top endurance of many times
the official specification, the current PRO line is 2 times of EVO and
the current EVO is already outstanding.