Hybrid Drives?

[peter5992]

Good evening everyone:

My main DAW is back in the shop, waiting for a motherboard transplant.

I thought of trying to make the best of a bad situation by upgrading the operating system (from windows vista to windows 7, clean install), memory and internal drives. It is a laptop custom built by PC Audiolabs back in 2009 with 12 GB RAM in total (3 x 4 GB) and three internal drives of 500 GB each (7200 RPM eSATA), one for the system / projects and one for samples in RAID 0 setup. It's getting pretty crowded both on the system disk and on the samples, and I already have had to install Hollywood Strings and Brass on an external drive, and I just got Woodwinds in the mail last night. Memory's ok for now but while I'm at it, why not put in some more.

I was thinking of replacing each of the internal drives by a 750 GB hybrid drive, like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-pla-_-NA-_-NA

Anyone have any experience with that, in terms of performance enhancement (faster loading of samples etc)? The manufacturer claims it is up to 3 times faster, but how does that work with music apps / sample loading?

In terms of space I would prefer three 1TB drives but with at least 7200 RPM these are significantly more expensive (eg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148973), without the benefit of a partial SSD. The less expensive 1 TB drives are all 5400 RPM and that probably won't cut it to run the Hollywood Series.

Thanks!

ps about memory apparently there are 8 GB memory sticks for laptop now, at a fraction of what I paid for my 4 GB sticks (http://www.oempcworld.com/Merchant2/...ID=C8090x005); it is crazy how these things come down in price.

[peter5992]

Bump!

Just got my laptop back from the shop (finally), and while the mobo was replaced, now one of the internal sample drives is fried ...

So, it's time to replace both sample drives (which are in Raid O setup). Again, does anyone have any perspective to offer on the above?

[Veneteaou]

No, hybrid drives are not useful for sample streaming. You want plain old SATA III SSDs.

As for storage, the cheapest solution is external drives. Unfortunately, it would be cheaper to build a desktop workstation than it would be to load performance storage drives into a laptop. I always recommend taking the time to budget out exactly how much you will be paying for mobility, and deciding whether or not that is worth it to you.

[tmcgill]

This thread is a couple of months old, but I thought people might be interested to know why, technically speaking, a hybrid drive is a poor fit for this particular application. A hybrid drive is really a combination of two things, a standard, spinning-platter hard drive, and a small SSD. The SSD portion is used as an extra-large drive cache, where data deemed likely to be needed in the immediate future (based on what is currently being read or written) is stored, so when it is requested it can be returned extremely quickly. This can help a lot with things like boot speed and application launch speed, since many of the most frequently accessed files such as application executables or regularly loaded operating system files will wind up in the SSD part of the drive and help speed things up.

The regular hard drive portion, however, acts a little differently than it does with most hard drives. Because the cache allows for many data requests to be served without accessing the traditional disk at all, the hard drive platter actually will spin down and remain at rest until it is needed. This can save on energy usage as compared to a regular drive, which is ordinarily kept spinning at 5400, 7200, or 10,000 RPM (depending on the drive) constantly as long as the computer is powered up (except when it jumps into power-saving mode). But it also means that anything not in the cache can often be much slower to retrieve than it would be with a normal drive, because the platter needs to get up to speed all the way from the idle state before reading it. Since a sample library is far too large to fit in the cache portion, and the idea is to be able to hit any sample at any time across the entire disk with as little delay as possible, a hybrid drive has some possibility of introducing frustrating sample reading latency at certain moments, and has no real benefit to make up for it in this usage scenario.

So by all means you may wish to use a hybrid drive for your boot disk and for installing applications, but for running sample libraries, or for audio or video production or other things that require quick random access, it will be no extra help for the cost and will sometimes be a hindrance.

[peter5992]

Thanks for the feedback. I swapped the original boot drive for a slightly larger hybrid drive, which turned into something of an upgrade nightmare with windows 7 not installing. I returned the drive and continued using the old drive (which, for all intents and purposes, could handle my problems). I ended up exchanging the two (RAID0) sample drives for larger drives, allowing me - hopefully - to run HS off the internal drives. At this point the laptop is still in the stop for a new mobo where it has spent most of the latter half of this year (but that is a completely different story).

[JBlongz]

Its unfortunate that you could not install Windows on the Momentus XT. I use 500GB XT drives, one running Apple's Mountain Lion, and the other running Ubuntu, Win7, Win8 as Vmware images. It's no SSD, but an improvement over traditional SSDs