Seek times are getting better by a factor around 10 at the moment. So pre-loading won't be erased with SSD drives, just you could load around 10 times more sound into RAM on the same computer. While I expect SSD to hit the market in 2008, the capacities will be too small for serious use with the whole Symphonic Cube. Prices would have to go down also more than just a bit to really be competitive against conventional HDDs for large capacities. If they ultimately will have their breakthrough, CPU will bcome the bottleneck for streaming and effect processing, but 64bit system will already be all around by then is my guess. The rewriting (if any) for VSl software would just have to allow for lower access times. Actually I'd love to see that there could be different settings applied on the same computer, so that you can have a set of samples which you need the most and fastly loaded on SSD drives, and the less used stuff sitting idle on conventional HDDs waiting to be used (with the settings we are used to now). That would make a smooth transition possible. Don't forget that yet the lifetime of SSD drives is limited in terms of write cycles, SSDs also consume comparably as much power as conventional HDDs when being in use.

PolarBear

All kind of parts fail sooner or later. And some will fail sooner, SSD won't make expections to that - I've seen recent harddrives fail on people after a few weeks. But yes MTBF is usually stated with around 2 million hours for SSD drives. Consumer products do behave a bit differntly than enterprise products usually though. I wouldn't care too much for it, if it is just for streaming purposes they will durate much longer than in normal desktop use, as well as soon enough we will find ourselves wanting for the bigger capacities availible in 2 years from now. Just like conventional HDDs also did that to us when we thought, wow, 40GB, who will ever need more than 5 of these...

640k ought to be enough for anyone...  

PolarBear 

 Thanks for your replies everyone.

Yes I agree at the moment the size of drives are only big enough for parts of the VSL library, and they are not cheap .... but they are not exhorbitant either.  I think if we apply Moore's law, we could have 256 Gb disks in two more years, for the same price a 64Gb disk costs now.

2 x 256Gb might just be big enough for most of my VSL library, though 3 x 256Gbwould be great.

The limited write cycles of these drives is not a problem, since we are talking READing samples, not writing / recording to the drives. And perhaps two years down the line the MTBF will have improved. I could see the MTDF a READ only SSD well exceeding a conventional hard drive.

Polar, I have read that power consumption is much less, but you sound pretty informed on this ......

Christian, can you convert the improvements in bandwidth and seek time into "instrument efficiencies" ?

 e.g.

-  if the preload buffer could be reduced by 8, then eight times more samples could be loaded into a given size of memory, right?

        (or to put it another, you wouldn't need 8 times as much memory - a 2 Gig allocation for samples would be the sames as a 16 Gig system)

- but could the bandwidth of the new drives be able to keep up with this ? 

Are you also saying the software would have to be tweaked ?

Has anyone else got view the timelines involved? Is Moore's Law the correct assumption about improvements for memory storage? 

Thanks andrew 

To put things in the right perspective as I misquoted it above... You'd need around the same power for 500GB of capacity with an array of 0.5W SSD drives compared to a single 10W  desktop drive at the moment. With capacities going up this will change. So yes, you're surely right that a single drive will consume considerably less power.

All the best, 

PolarBear 

 i'm still not considering this to be a reasonable solution ... 160 GB is something for say the special edition and a few additions ...

it would be cheaper to add loads of RAM rather than purchasing such a drive.

still waiting for a reliable report about latency dropouts (resp. having confirmed there are none) - so far i have 2 unusable samsung SSDs here and refuse to spend more money on pieces just for the hardware museum ...

christian

 on a 13 GB mac (assumably a MacPro - but a somehow uneven value for memory ...) you should at least reach 3 GB for VE without problems ...

samsung SSDs and all clones / re-branded models have latency spikes every 1 - 4 seconds which makes it unusable for sample streaming ... from the intel SSDs it is reported they are fragmenting when used (should not apply to read access though)

Speaking of Samsung SSD's, here's a promotional video of someone attaching 24 of them to one box, and treating them as one huge 2GB-per-second array.

Samsung: for when ludicrously expensive just isn't ridiculously expensive enough.