# SSD drive for HS is so far disappointing.



## Ashermusic (Aug 26, 2010)

So I bought this Corsair 256 SSD drive for $650 to run HS. I have a Quad Core 2.66 w/ 13 GB running 10.6.4.

Here is what I have in my VE Pro Template for each section, Vlns 1 & 2, Vla, Celli, and Bass, all separate instanciations:

Legato Slur LT12
Sus KS C0-F#0
Stac Marc MOD LS
and 1 Full Pizz.

So a total of 16 Play instances as EW recommends using separate rather than multi-timbral. I could of course do it in 5 multi-timbral instances and maybe that would be better?

Load time seems only a minute or two faster than from the Terapack.

Performance in Logic Pro 9 connected to the VE pro 32 bit server seems only a little more robust and I cannot lower the buffer size running it from the SSD rather than the Terapack.

So I am wondering if I spent almost $700 for a marginal improvement. I will however try some other settings to see if it improves things.


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## NYC Composer (Aug 26, 2010)

Jay, you probably noticed, but in case not:

http://www.vi-control.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17699


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## Ashermusic (Aug 26, 2010)

OK, this may be something in VE Pro as I am now trying 5 multi-timbral instances and it is looking more promising. More later.


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## Mike Connelly (Aug 26, 2010)

Is there more of a difference running the patches directly in Logic instead of with VEP?


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## sbkp (Aug 27, 2010)

Far from exhaustive (and not even with HS, actually), but I've done one SSD test on a Mac and one SSD test on a Windows machine. Results in a nutshell:

Mac: ho-hum
Windows: !!!!!!!!!!!

Now, it was a different test, hardly scientific, different SSDs, etc, etc. But I was totally underwhelmed on the Mac, and totally blown away on the Windows machine.


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## Synesthesia (Aug 27, 2010)

Stefan,

Can you elaborate?

I'm running SSDs on my windows machines and also on my Logic mac (a Quad 2008 model) and it seems fine running all my perc, Tonehammer Requiem and a few other bits from that drive. I haven't heard any dropped notes yet..

Would love to hear more!

Cheers,

Paul


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## gsilbers (Aug 27, 2010)

[quote="

So I am wondering if I spent almost $700 for a marginal improvement. I will however try some other settings to see if it improves things.[/quote]

that my overall opinion about SSD drives. but i havent tried them yet. :( 
its just my impression from web readings. 
too pricey for the modest improvement, when prices get lowered then i guess yes. 
also, they have a llimited lifetime. forgot the average time though.


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## Mike Connelly (Aug 27, 2010)

They don't have a limited lifetime as much as a limited number of writes before fail. With a sample playback drive that shouldn't be an issue.


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## JohnG (Aug 27, 2010)

Guys, it's not a marginal improvement. It's like a 30x to 60x improvement, or more.

Check this:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storag ... d-review/8


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## Synesthesia (Aug 27, 2010)

JohnG @ Fri Aug 27 said:


> Guys, it's not a marginal improvement. It's like a 30x to 60x improvement, or more.
> 
> Check this:
> 
> http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storag ... d-review/8



+1.

Its been a huge improvement for me. You can reduce the buffer preload size in K4 from default 60KB down to at least 12 KB. Some have it even lower.


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## gsilbers (Aug 27, 2010)

Mike Connelly @ Fri Aug 27 said:


> They don't have a limited lifetime as much as a limited number of writes before fail. With a sample playback drive that shouldn't be an issue.



thats what it is. thx


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## Ashermusic (Aug 27, 2010)

Thomas_J @ Fri Aug 27 said:


> Unfortunately for Mac users you are behind in the technology race. Your Mac is probably lacking a sata interface capable of moving data at the speed of the ssd drive (sata-2). The difference on my pc is monumental. The Crucial c300 drives need Sata 3 to perform to their maximum capability.



Swami Jay says, "I see an inexpensive but capable PC in my future as a slave."


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## Stevie (Aug 27, 2010)

I have a Corsair 128 and I can run all samples with a 6kb buffer in Kontakt  (LASS, Symphobia and some VSL from the K4 lib).
Running W7 64.


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## chimuelo (Aug 27, 2010)

Corsair 128Gs' are perfect for live work.
I have so much snap with my TOP/EWF Horn Sections now.
CHHorns 2s' Troms & Trumps were always pretty tight from DFD settings, but the Saxes were a little mushy.
But now the Saxes, especially the Bari bark and bite.


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## Ashermusic (Aug 28, 2010)

Thomas_J @ Fri Aug 27 said:


> Unfortunately for Mac users you are behind in the technology race. Your Mac is probably lacking a sata interface capable of moving data at the speed of the ssd drive (sata-2). The difference on my pc is monumental. The Crucial c300 drives need Sata 3 to perform to their maximum capability.



Apparently the primary issue is that OSX does not yet support Trim.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM_%28SSD_command%29


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## Udo (Aug 28, 2010)

TRIM/Garbage collection is not an issue when SSDs are used for reading only (like when used for samples).


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## Ashermusic (Aug 28, 2010)

Udo @ Sat Aug 28 said:


> TRIM/Garbage collection is not an issue when SSDs are used for reading only (like when used for samples).



Oh, then is it strictly a SATA 3 vs SATA 2 issue?


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## Jack Weaver (Aug 28, 2010)

Get a $50 eSATA3 PCIe card and an external enclosure that handles eSATA.

.


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## JohnG (Aug 28, 2010)

This sounds like it; don't really know for sure if this is exactly the hardware one would need, but the place was recommended to me:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/turnkey/iMac_2010_27

It may be that one doesn't need all this, but it looks as though they have planned for Mac customers.


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## Frederick Russ (Aug 28, 2010)

Jack Weaver @ Sat Aug 28 said:


> Get a $50 eSATA3 PCIe card and an external enclosure that handles eSATA.
> 
> .



Here is the PCIe eSata card for anyone interested:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20 ... XPCIE6GS2/


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## gsilbers (Aug 28, 2010)

ok, im getting confused...

whats going on with external esata and SSD? 

does an eternal disk drive with esata faster than or equal than internal SSD?


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## JohnG (Aug 28, 2010)

I'm just catching up here too, but this is roughly what others have told me:

Many motherboards don't accommodate the 6 GB/second that these cards will. So, if I understand it correctly, this card is better even though it's external if either is true:

1. you have a SATA 3 disk and your motherboard doesn't accommodate that, or

2. you want to use hardware RAID and your motherboard doesn't handle that.

I am almost certain that I read a Doug Rogers post that hardware RAID had delivered the best performance for a test that VisionDAW ran for EW, but then one doesn't know whether Doug has perfect knowledge either, or how exactly VisionDAW ran the test or what they were doing exactly when they ran it -- what kind of benchmarking they actually did.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it appears that everyone is groping around, at least a bit, to figure out what the "next generation right now" solution is.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Aug 28, 2010)

Is throughput really the bottleneck? I'd be very surprised.


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## Jack Weaver (Aug 28, 2010)

Yeah.... I know it's unusual, since most often with sample libraries it's the access times that are most important. That's why traditionally people have gone for the higher rotational speed drives to get more performance. 

But with HS it really is more the throughput that's the bottleneck. These patches are so darn big that playing more than two or three Legato patches simultaneously caused the telltale popping sound with less than an optimal drive setup. (I know that EW also suggest that using a larger number of Play instances helps with this.) 

I started by putting HS on my Master machine with a regular 7200 rpm drive. Performance was minimally acceptable. I then went to a an external RAID 0 with SSD's using a eSATA 6G card. I get many more voices now before hearing pops. 

Next I'm moving the RAID off my Master machine (running Mac OS) and putting it on a slave Mac Pro running Vista64. 2 advantages here - being able to run in 64-bit and not having to load my current VE Pro template every time I need to reboot the Master. I'm really grateful that EW is now allowing 2 iLok licenses without extra payment. I'll still want to put those patches that aren't available on my slave on the Master machine within the Logic song I'm working on at any time. 

I also put a SSD as system drive on the Master. It's nice that it boots a little faster now but I really did it hoping to boost communication speed to Logic so I wouldn't get as many sync errors in larger template songs. It's seems to help with this but it's a little hard to get metrics with this situation and know if it's doing a lot better. It seems better. 

.


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## Ashermusic (Aug 29, 2010)

Frederick Russ @ Sat Aug 28 said:


> Jack Weaver @ Sat Aug 28 said:
> 
> 
> > Get a $50 eSATA3 PCIe card and an external enclosure that handles eSATA.
> ...



So before I go spending more money and get disappointed again, If I install this, take my Corsair 256 out of the computer and put it in an eSaATA case and connect it, will I see the kind of performance boost I was expecting, more comparable to TJ and Guy's experience, when I bought it?


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## Stevie (Aug 29, 2010)

On a sidenote: many people think that an SSD will speed up their CPU in some way, but instruments who make heavy use of scripting like HS and LASS will still be as heavy on CPU as with a normal HDD.
The advantage of an SSD is to reduce the pre-buffer size in Kontakt, which results in more (free) RAM. But if a library is heavy on CPU, only OCing or a new CPU can help.


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## Stephen Baysted (Aug 29, 2010)

JohnG @ Sun Aug 29 said:


> The question is all the more interesting, at least to me, as I hear Hollywood Brass is being recorded fairly soon.



+1. It would be nice to be able to plan ahead for (more) multiple machines etc, particularly if Hollywood Brass is half as good as Hollywood Strings.


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## JohnG (Aug 29, 2010)

Thomas_J @ 29th August 2010 said:


> The music I did that's featured in the HS demo section was all done using one PC with 12gb ram and a 256gb Crucial C300. For me this drive is performing brilliantly, giving me upwards of 700 voices.



Are you using PLAY within Bidule or another host, TJ? I guess I'm not alone in being very keen to get 700 voices!

Thanks for any tips.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Aug 29, 2010)

Hey TJ, my next question is what it is in Macs that's causing them be behind the technology curve. In other words, unless there's something wrong with their PCI-e implementation, a cheapo SATA card like the one Jack's recommending should work (because their motherboards are now pretty standard for the most part).


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## Frederick Russ (Aug 29, 2010)

I still believe that the optimal way is via dedicated external PCs (as TJ mentions in his post which I also confirmed with another Hollywood Strings demo maker) and let the Mac DAW handle the rest. And Jay, I don't know for absolute certain if the eSata thing would work - in retrospect, it seems silly to have to accessorize a Mac to accommodate technology that already exists in higher end PCs but aren't on the Apple side - seems like a deeper problem to have something so conspicuously missing.

edit: what we really need is to talk to somebody who is already doing this on a Mac and find out if it works or not.


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## Jack Weaver (Aug 29, 2010)

I actually do have one more smaller SSD hanging off my Mac on FW 800 that I use for samples. I used to use it for LASS until I moved LASS off to a slave. However I don't think LASS needs nearly the throughput (hence no worries w/ FW 800 here) that HS requires. I used it for faster access times for LASS. Now I use it for Vienna Imperial piano. Seems to work quite good. I never wanted to replace any of my current sample drives on the Macs with SSD's. I prefer using them externally. 

I think there is a company that makes a package of extra drive slots for Mac Pro's that connect via an eSata connector. I don't remember whether that is eSATA 2 or 3. It may have been Newer Technology or someone like that. But they were definitely a Mac-centric vendor. 

I'm sticking with my recommendation for Jay. He knows my phone number if he wants to chat.

This thing doesn't seem like so much of a mystery to me. 

.


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## JohnG (Aug 29, 2010)

Jack Weaver @ 29th August 2010 said:


> This thing doesn't seem like so much of a mystery to me.



I think that's because you know what you are doing Jack!


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## Nick Batzdorf (Aug 29, 2010)

> it seems silly to have to accessorize a Mac to accommodate technology that already exists in higher end PCs but aren't on the Apple side - seems like a deeper problem to have something so conspicuously missing



I wouldn't necessarily say that, Freddie. Macs are one-size-fits-all computers; Apple picks and chooses features based on what they've determined people will use. For example, how many higher-end PCs have two ethernet ports?

If a $50 card will solve the problem, I don't think that means they're behind the curve, it means they don't think very many people are going to be using SSDs at really high bandwidth.


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## Frederick Russ (Aug 29, 2010)

I certainly hope you're right Nick. eSATA3 would have been a nice addition especially in tandem with SSD - so hopefully the omission wasn't due to another problem which was the only thing I alluded to in my post: that it makes less sense to go eSATA3 and SSD unless it was clear that the SATA3 protocol would work in Macs period. It wasn't to question whether eSATA2 and SSD would work because I know it will. I would love to hear about anyone who has eSATA3 throughput working however - would be great news actually.


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## Stevie (Aug 30, 2010)

Nick Batzdorf @ 30th August 2010 said:


> For example, how many higher-end PCs have two ethernet ports?



Erm, a lot? 
My last 3 PCs all had 2 ethernet ports.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Aug 30, 2010)

Because you chose a board with that feature, Stevie.

Is my point really being lost?


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## Vision (Aug 30, 2010)

What do you all think of something like this, specifically for Mac in my case. 

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/s ... drive.html


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## Jack Weaver (Aug 30, 2010)

I called these people about this before I bought my SSD's.

At that time there was no testing on Mac for them and the talk on the street was that there was a pretty small sampling of PC motherboards that will support them.

Too bad, it seems like a good idea. 

.


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## Stevie (Aug 30, 2010)

Nick Batzdorf @ 30th August 2010 said:


> Because you chose a board with that feature, Stevie.
> Is my point really being lost?



Well, not quite. I didn't chose the boards by the amount of ethernet adapters.
I never buy the cheapest but also not the most expensive board. 
So every middle class mobo has that feature. I mean, Apple doesn't go for the cheapest mobos either


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## Vision (Aug 30, 2010)

Jack Weaver @ Mon Aug 30 said:


> I called these people about this before I bought my SSD's.
> 
> At that time there was no testing on Mac for them and the talk on the street was that there was a pretty small sampling of PC motherboards that will support them.
> 
> ...



I thought OCZ was preparing an updated driver. I wonder what the hold up is. That's a shame, I would be interested in seeing performance numbers on a Mac with this setup.


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## Vision (Aug 30, 2010)

It seems they have a few variations too. Didn't really bother to read about the differences yet.

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/s ... ate_drives


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## Nick Batzdorf (Aug 30, 2010)

This stuff makes me grumble. I've spent way too much money over the years on storage-related junk that's useful for six months.

ATTO SCSI cards and exotic cables for Pro Tools. $ several hundred for a Dynatek box with a 330MB (not GB, MB). $1100 for a 1GB Micropolis drive that broke. $ several hundred for a swappable FireWire system from Granite Digital that was always slow and doesn't work anymore. $375 for a SATA card plus $100 for an internal drive bracket on my last machine (G5).

That's a tiny smattering just of the stupid storage crap littering my garage - and I'm not even beginning to mention things like the 32GB WD Raptor, because it does still work well even though it's minuscule. Nor have I mentioned the piles of other ridiculous computer accessories, such as dual-monitor cards, endless boxes full of exotic cables, and of course obsolete audio hardware such as Pro Tools MIX.

I for one have passed my f-it threshold.

That's not à propos HS, by the way, just a rant about how we're still rats on a treadmill even now that computer-years have become longer. 

(Computer years used to be 20 years; a 4-year-old machine was like a 60-year-old man: capable of a lot but generally unable to compete with athletes in their physical prime. Now computer years are about 15 years.)


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## rgames (Aug 30, 2010)

Note that you can sign up for Newegg's "Shell Shocker" deals that they send out every day - SSD's have shown up there several times at really good prices. I think it's usually about $2 per gigabyte when they pop up.

Still haven't made the switch - good ol' 7200 RPM drives across three PC's seem to be doing fine. Not running HS, though...

Current prices still make multiple 7200's a better deal by a long shot, I think.

TJ's comment about 700 streaming voices is impressive, though. That's the first time I've seen someone post a meaningful number.

rgames


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## gsilbers (Aug 30, 2010)

rgames @ Mon Aug 30 said:


> Note that you can sign up for Newegg's "Shell Shocker" deals that they send out every day - SSD's have shown up there several times at really good prices. I think it's usually about $2 per gigabyte when they pop up.
> 
> Still haven't made the switch - good ol' 7200 RPM drives across three PC's seem to be doing fine. Not running HS, though...
> 
> ...



+1


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## Hannes_F (Aug 30, 2010)

Nick Batzdorf @ Mon Aug 30 said:


> (Computer years used to be 20 years; a 4-year-old machine was like a 60-year-old man: capable of a lot but generally unable to compete with athletes in their physical prime. Now computer years are about 15 years.)



So a 4-year-old machine is then like a 45 years man - hey, that is how old I am.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Aug 30, 2010)

Yeah, maybe 16 years is closer to it - a 4-year-old machine is like a 64-year-old man. Of course, that only applies to athletics, not to playing instruments or to the brain!

But I do think the analogy is pretty good. At 64 you can still go on long hikes, play tennis, run, shag for hours...but you've lost a couple of steps compared to when you were in your 20s. 

And until recently it really was 20 man-years. The software we run is a major athletic challenge for a computer.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Aug 30, 2010)

Oh - and that was a typo: the 4-year-old machine was an *80*-year-old man.


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## NYC Composer (Aug 30, 2010)

The '700 voices' has us all pretty curious, I'm thinking.

As the SSD/SATA 3/whatever shakes out in the next few months, hopefully a good situation will become obvious. I hope it's not hardware RAID-between the striping and the need for redundancy due to the increased danger of failure, that seems the most cumbersome approach.


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## JT3_Jon (Aug 30, 2010)

on a related note, is there any advantage to using a SSD drive as a system drive?


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## SvK (Aug 30, 2010)

OK...

I own a MAC:

2 x 3GHz Dual-COre Intel Xeon
16 Gig of RAM
(2006 Mac Pro 1,1)

I buy me one of those TJ crucial SSD , 256Gig drives + the SATA 3 adapter


Am I running HS happily, or very hosed?

ps: Yes the machine would be doing DAW duties as well.

SvK


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## SvK (Aug 30, 2010)

OR are you guys saying that in a MAC the SATA3 adapter simply allows a SATA3 drive top work, BUT your still not getting the desired throughput?

SvK


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## gsilbers (Aug 30, 2010)

SvK @ Mon Aug 30 said:


> OK...
> 
> 
> 
> ...



can you expand or put it easier to understand. a little cryptic for me  

are going to or you already have?

are u ok running HS?


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## SvK (Aug 30, 2010)

I've answered my own question with the help of our IT Dept.

If you own a MAC, (not the new ones that just got released this month), installing a SATA3 adapter and buying a SSD drive will do NOTHING to improve your voice-count / sample-streaming. The SSD drive will behave just like the other SATA drives since the SATA3 adapter does not allow you to tap into the throughput that a motherboard with SATA3 compliance would allow.

gsilbers:

Hi...no I haven't bought HS yet. Have the money for PC and Library though. Just figuring it all out. Looks like I will buy a HP PC for circa 1295$ with 16gig of RAM and HS though. ANd a crucial 256gig SSD

SvK


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## Synesthesia (Aug 30, 2010)

This is a very very interesting discussion..

So if I am hot rodding an old PC in a nice rack case, (normal form factor) what would be a great SATA 3 mobo?

I have an instinctive preference for Intel mobos because of all the nonsense plugged onto the opposition (graphics stuff etc) that I'm not interested in - but I'd love to hear some opinions.

TJ - if you are still reading, presumably you are SATA3 - whats your mobo and processor of choice?

Cheers!

Paul


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## JohnG (Aug 30, 2010)

Hi all, 

This morning on "Technological Grope-Fest," the Vastly Superior Humans at various vendors of RAID gear told me:

1. 500 / 600 MB/second is about the fastest throughput available today;

2. on a PC you can measure how fast your drive reads and writes data using a free download from ATTO (a company). It's called "ATTO Disk Benchmark" and I downloaded it from here, risking viruses and who knows what else. I couldn't find it on ATTO's own site, so I hope that doesn't mean that everyone will now be SPAMed by me: http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/11 ... v2.34.html

3. The super expensive ($1,000) hardware RAID 0 controller promises something like a 20% improvement in speed over a software RAID 0 off the motherboard that I have (which is a year old Gigabyte). Then the guy said that the quite expensive ($300-400 and up), very robust hardware RAID 0 controller from ATTO does close to the same thing if you only have two disks in the RAID. These latter are apparently not "true" hardware RAID but something in between. http://www.attostore.com/sas-sata-hbas/

4. The less expensive ($50-100) RAID 0 controllers, I'm told, have less memory, less built-in CPU of their own (so therefore don't shoulder as much of the load from the computer's CPU as the more expensive ones), and fewer inputs (though enough for me). 

Nobody seems able to specify exactly how much improvement anyone will experience with a particular configuration, because everyone's system is idiosyncratic, but one guy said you could expect throughput to roughly double in hardware RAID 0 compared with a single disk by itself. So if your SSD is 280 MB/s, you could theoretically get over 500 MB/s using a hardware RAID.

I can't vouch for any of this beyond reporting what people told me.


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## Mike Connelly (Aug 30, 2010)

Nick Batzdorf @ Sun Aug 29 said:


> > it seems silly to have to accessorize a Mac to accommodate technology that already exists in higher end PCs but aren't on the Apple side - seems like a deeper problem to have something so conspicuously missing
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I have to disagree on this one. They absolutely could have made the SATA busses 3 instead of 2 and it would have added very little (if anything) to the cost of the machine. This definitely is something that will benefit users, especially since they are selling SSD drives as an option. There's really no excuse for this one, they just dropped the ball.

But even without SATA 3, a SSD drive should still be a huge improvement. Top speed is about 350 megs per second but on SATA2 it should still be able to get about 250+ no problem, which is still a huge improvement over any conventional hard drive.

In the case of hollywood strings, I wonder if a bottleneck is PLAY not being 64 bit, meaning that it is all going through a bit bridge. Running plugins on the bridge does seem to be less CPU efficient, I wonder if that is wasting much of the potential speed of the SSD?

What about trying the biggest Kontakt library you can find on the mac with the lowest possible buffer settings? How does it work, and what disk throughput is shown in Activity Monitor. Heck, are there drive benchmarks for OSX to see how fast the data is actually going?


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## Hannes_F (Aug 30, 2010)

Perhaps Raid 5 or Raid 10 with 4 x 7200 U/min drives could be an option, too?


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## Stephen Baysted (Aug 30, 2010)

Whilst 700 voices sounds a lot - in terms of polyphony and templates it really isn't. Try loading up one of the Celli sustain patches and play a 4 note chord. Holding notes down shows 52 voices, on release this jumps to 64. If you hold down 6 notes you get 72 voices, on release 96. That's one patch, 6 note poly. 

Sobering if you ask me. 

Cheers

Stephen


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## gsilbers (Aug 30, 2010)

a little OT:
by any chance what we are talking about relate to PC motherboards being sata 3gb or 6gs (true sata 6Gb/s)?

SSD drives on a 3gb sata cable/interface would be pointless?


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## JohnG (Aug 30, 2010)

gsilbers @ 30th August 2010 said:


> SSD drives on a 3gb sata cable/interface would be pointless?



I don't think pointless at all. Thomas was only using one, so we know that you can get a lot of notes out of that. The max speed of the ones I've looked at is less than 300 MB/s so, therefore, I think that SATA II standard with which modern Macs are equipped accommodates a single SSD's top speed. If I understand it correctly.

The higher SATA standard would be needed, I think, only if one is operating a RAID formed from two or more SSDs. And I'm not sure that's even an absolute ceiling, because the ATTO Disk test is telling me that the RAID 0 I have going on my allegedly SATA II PC motherboard is exceeding 300 MB/s for larger file sizes.

So, to summarise, on modern Macs I don't think there is any practical limit with a single SSD unless you are looking at one with a speed of more than 300 MB/s. 

I am pretty sure that's one of the things Mike Connelly said in his post.

[EDIT: Plus, I think the point of the PCIe Hardware RAID controller is to bypass the SATA limitations anyway.]


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## JKranz EW (Aug 30, 2010)

Although a _bit_ pricey :shock: it is possible to take the SATA transfer out of the equation on the mac...

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/s ... s-ssd.html

Would be interesting to see how this competes... 1.4 GB / sec transfer rate! =o 


-Jonathan


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## rgames (Aug 30, 2010)

I've never been able to wrap my head around transfer rate specs - for what we need they don't tell as much as number of stereo channels you can stream. And there's not necessarily a one-to-one correlation.

For example, the 700 streaming voices mentioned above should be about 175 MB/s (for 24 bit / 44.1 kHz stereo samples). Nowhere near the 500 MB/s because those transfer rates are usually for a single stream - we need multiple streams at the same time. You can't just add them up because there's a lot of overhead associated with handling multiple streams. It's just like multiple processors - doubling the number of processors doesn't double the throughput.

So I'd still like to see more data on number of streams at 24/44.1 or whatever. Single-stream read rates (what are always quoted) should be related but, again, it's not one-to-one and I could see where it would break down at some point and not show an advantage for what we need.

I remember having this same discussion a few months ago...

rgames


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## JohnG (Aug 30, 2010)

Fair enough that it's not one-to-one. On the other hand, one assumes that throughput and voice count are highly correlated.

On that subject, I heard second hand that VisionDAW recently ran some voice-count benchmarking test -- which may have been pretty informal -- for EW using a hardware RAID. Still don't quite know how high they got in voice count or what the exact hardware setup was that they used.


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## chimuelo (Aug 30, 2010)

The idea that anyone would have to use RAID for an instrument to operate is sad.
We have the throughput, access time and size issues handled.
We also have the most powerful CPU's now to run these apps.
IMHO these giant sized instruments are way behind in their SSE4 optimizations.

The main reason I bought SSD's in the first place was for access times.
Now I can use even lower buffers, and add the fact that Kontakt has NCW as we see in LASS Lite. It seemed wise to go this way as I prefer to load instruments and apps that are highly optimized.


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## rgames (Aug 30, 2010)

JohnG @ Mon Aug 30 said:


> On the other hand, one assumes that throughput and voice count are highly correlated.



You'd think so... strange that I haven't seen the numbers, though, except for the one above.

A few years ago there was a utility that measured how many stereo tracks a drive could handle. I'd love to see someone run that on a SSD. That's what we really want to know.

Probably depends on OS and sampler/sequencer, as well, because it's implemented differently in different software.

rgames


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## Nick Batzdorf (Aug 30, 2010)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/scien ... te.html?hp


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## Frederick Russ (Aug 30, 2010)

Nick Batzdorf @ Mon Aug 30 said:


> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/science/31compute.html?hp



Fascinating read Nick - thanks for sharing. Guess we still have to wait 5 years before silicon chip ram is a reality though.


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## Ashermusic (Aug 30, 2010)

Thomas_J @ Mon Aug 30 said:


> Hey guys, just back from the first Hollywood Brass calibration session. You are going to love this library! I can't remember being this excited about samples, ever. Shawn Murphy has done the most amazing job with this one. It's all a very humbling experience. Amazing players, amazing engineer, amazing equipment.
> 
> SSD drives are definitely here to replace the old mechanical contraptions, but I don't know anything about the Mac side of things so I will refrain from making any recommendations. To me SSD drives have more appeal than just increased throughput. I take great comfort in the fact that there are no moving parts, and that the drives are likely going to last a whole lot longer than my old ones. If you've ever listened to a mechanical drive do its thing during a highly taxing sequence, you'll probably agree that the constant hard drive access sound is very unnerving. It's like you just know something's gonna go wrong at some point. And it eventually does.
> The second benefit to SSDs is the seek time, and really, this is exciting in itself because with a 0.1ms seek time you are in theory eliminating the need to have portions of the samples stored in ram (buffers). It is essentially a ram drive with a read speed limit of 350mb/s. The programmers at EW are working on an SSD setting in PLAY that will take advantage of this.
> ...



You want to buy mine?


----------



## José Herring (Aug 30, 2010)

What's a calibration session?


----------



## JJP (Aug 30, 2010)

JohnG @ Mon Aug 30 said:


> This morning on "Technological Grope-Fest"...


Most descriptive terminology I've heard in while. o-[][]-o


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## KingIdiot (Aug 30, 2010)

josejherring @ Mon Aug 30 said:


> What's a calibration session?



you know... "hey 3rd french horn, you need to move two steps to the left (to hell)"


----------



## Vision (Aug 30, 2010)

Thomas_J @ Mon Aug 30 said:


> Hey guys, just back from the first Hollywood Brass calibration session. You are going to love this library! I can't remember being this excited about samples, ever. Shawn Murphy has done the most amazing job with this one. It's all a very humbling experience. Amazing players, amazing engineer, amazing equipment.
> 
> SSD drives are definitely here to replace the old mechanical contraptions, but I don't know anything about the Mac side of things so I will refrain from making any recommendations. To me SSD drives have more appeal than just increased throughput. I take great comfort in the fact that there are no moving parts, and that the drives are likely going to last a whole lot longer than my old ones. If you've ever listened to a mechanical drive do its thing during a highly taxing sequence, you'll probably agree that the constant hard drive access sound is very unnerving. It's like you just know something's gonna go wrong at some point. And it eventually does.
> The second benefit to SSDs is the seek time, and really, this is exciting in itself because with a 0.1ms seek time you are in theory eliminating the need to have portions of the samples stored in ram (buffers). It is essentially a ram drive with a read speed limit of 350mb/s. The programmers at EW are working on an SSD setting in PLAY that will take advantage of this.
> ...



TJ, I honestly don't know if this thread is mentally prepared for any HB (Hollywood Brass) news just yet. lol. How large do you estimate HB will be? I assume HB will be "easier" on CPU's and Hard-drives, do to the nature of brass sampling being more of a straight forward process? More-so than HS? 

Personally, I'm going to look more into that OCZ drive I was asking about. It seems like the cleanest, easiest, fastest solution for now.. if it works. I need the write off anyway.. :|

Edit.. Holy crap, I just looked up the price for the 1tb.. um. yeah.. Just doesn't seem practical at this point, and that's an understatement.


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## Danny_Owen (Aug 31, 2010)

I might be wrong on this one, but In theory the new macs should be able to handle both HS and HB at the same time (with severe upgrades of course). 

OWC are saying the new 8 and 12 cores can run 64GB of RAM- pair that with 4 internal SSDs (which can all stream at 3GB/s), and some external eSATA SSDs that everyone has been talking about (assuming it can run all that at the same time) and you have a streaming BEAST.

That's the theory... will it work in practice? Who knows.


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## Ashermusic (Aug 31, 2010)

Danny_Owen @ Tue Aug 31 said:


> I might be wrong on this one, but In theory the new macs should be able to handle both HS and HB at the same time (with severe upgrades of course).
> 
> OWC are saying the new 8 and 12 cores can run 64GB of RAM- pair that with 4 internal SSDs (which can all stream at 3GB/s), and some external eSATA SSDs that everyone has been talking about (assuming it can run all that at the same time) and you have a streaming BEAST.
> 
> That's the theory... will it work in practice? Who knows.



OK everyone here who can afford THAT setup, raise your hands.


----------



## Danny_Owen (Aug 31, 2010)

ha, a very fair point, certainly not me yet! And I'm not sure if there's any libraries at the moment that would warrant such a crazy machine.

But, it's nice to know the technology is already there, and it will only come down in price from that.


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## chimuelo (Aug 31, 2010)

I am sure Intel, Apple and M$ appreciate the business.......... :roll: 
How much forthe 256GB Corsair Jay..?
I have to use something larger than the 128GB until more NCW libraries are available.
I guess LASS Lite has taken the lead here along with NI.
I am always 2 years behind everybody with " upgrades " though. My rig has to work or I don't paid.


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## Ashermusic (Aug 31, 2010)

chimuelo @ Tue Aug 31 said:


> I am sure Intel, Apple and M$ appreciate the business.......... :roll:
> How much forthe 256GB Corsair Jay..?
> I have to use something larger than the 128GB until more NCW libraries are available.
> I guess LASS Lite has taken the lead here along with NI.
> I am always 2 years behind everybody with " upgrades " though. My rig has to work or I don't paid.



I paid $650 plus $25 for the Icy Dock. Its yours for $550.


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## chimuelo (Aug 31, 2010)

That's a sore dick deal..................Can't beat it. :lol: 
I shall consult my other half for an early Christmas present, and as long as I can transfer the warranty I might want to snag it.
The Corsiar 128 is slightly slower than your 256GB, but these drives are more than plenty for normal instruments.
I will pm you within a day.
Ankyu.


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## JT3_Jon (Aug 31, 2010)

SvK @ Mon Aug 30 said:


> I've answered my own question with the help of our IT Dept.
> 
> If you own a MAC, (not the new ones that just got released this month), installing a SATA3 adapter and buying a SSD drive will do NOTHING to improve your voice-count / sample-streaming. The SSD drive will behave just like the other SATA drives since the SATA3 adapter does not allow you to tap into the throughput that a motherboard with SATA3 compliance would allow.
> SvK



This would imply that the new macs DO tap into the throughput using an SATA3 adapter and an SSD drive, SvK?


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## Mike Connelly (Aug 31, 2010)

JohnG @ Mon Aug 30 said:


> The max speed of the ones I've looked at is less than 300 MB/s so, therefore, I think that SATA II standard with which modern Macs are equipped accommodates a single SSD's top speed.



The crucial C300 drives are faster than SATA II (over 300 megs/second) and will be limited if you have that instead of III.

Thomas, any word on 64 bit PLAY for mac? It seems like having to use the 32 bit bridge is going to be a bottleneck and may be one thing negating the speed of an SSD. It seems like that should help quite a bit, also Logic still isn't using more than 8 cores so if that gets optimized that should make a big difference as well.

Jay, are you really going to sell the SSD? Did you end up trying it with Kontakt libraries - does it help more with those or still not much of a difference? And even if it doesn't make much of a difference with playback performance, shouldn't it speed up load times a lot?


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## José Herring (Aug 31, 2010)

Thomas_J @ Mon Aug 30 said:


> Hello Jose, just Shawn doing his magic: setting up the mics, getting everything balanced relative to our string recordings, recording some actual music to get the levels right, mic placement/distance, seating etc.



Thanks TJ. 

I was wondering if you're planing on setting up a computer for Hollywood Brass or if you think you can handle the Brass on the same computer as Hollywood Strings? I know it's a bit early to tell, but in your best estimate do you think Hollywood Brass will be as resource heavy as the Strings?

If need be what I'm planning on doing is setting up a PC just for the EW Hollywood collection. I'd like to avoid having to set up a PC for each section, though I won't rule out the possibility of doing so. I've not been this excited about a collection of samples in my entire life and I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that I'll do just about anything to get the full use of HS and HB and also HW when it comes out.

Looking down the road a bit it might not be such a bad idea to get a computer for each section. I'm not one of those that dreams on running everything on one computer (at least not anymore).

best,

Jose


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## rgames (Aug 31, 2010)

Jay - before you dump it, see if you can determine how many stereo streams it will handle. I think there's a utility that does that but can't find it.

I think that might be the issue: you might have super-fast reads on a single stream but there's some issue when you try to read a bunch of different streams. Nobody ever measures multi-stream performance for some reason...

rgames


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## JohnG (Aug 31, 2010)

Jay,

Of course you will do as you see fit, but consider calling one of the PCIe RAID controller card manufacturers before giving up. 

If I have it straight, the RAID setup would allow you to bypass the limits of the Mac's SATA bus. I'm passing on a link to one that claims a 500MB/s speed. There are more expensive ones that may be better or use less CPU.

And it's always worth confirming with their tech support that this hypothesis -- PCI RAID will beat SATA.

Link -- note that this particular card is EXTERNAL. Some of the more expensive cards can be accessed internally so you can plug your disk(s) in without moving them. Or you can do what I would do and just fish the cables out through the case somewhere, but I suppose that violates OSHA or something:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20 ... XPCIE6GRS/


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## Peter Alexander (Aug 31, 2010)

EastWest clearly recommended in the HS manual to get the SSDs in RAID 0 Config.

With the Mac today, PLAY 2.x has a 10GB Limitation. On the PC, it reads all the RAM in the system. 

So my system question is if you have 24GB of RAM in a PC with HS on 

1. a WD Caviar Black with 64MB of Cache, can you load a full string template into RAM? Or do you need more than 24GB of RAM to do so?

2. a single SSD, can you load a full string template into RAM? Or do you need more than 24GB of RAM to do so?

3. a RAID 0 SSD config, can you load a full string template into RAM? Or do you need more than 24GB of RAM to do so?

The answer to these questions should help to plan ahead for HB, HWW, etc.


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## stonzthro (Aug 31, 2010)

I think it's going to need to be HWWW


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## Mike Connelly (Aug 31, 2010)

I was just going to say that - they're going to call it Hollywood Woodwinds (assuming cinesamples doesn't try and stop them based on the name being too close. I wonder if EW or Cinesamples trademarked HW Brass or HW Percussion for future use.


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## JFB (Aug 31, 2010)

Just got an email from FrimTek about this SATA-3 card. Might be worth checking out.

http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-e6g/


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## Jack Weaver (Aug 31, 2010)

I haven't really checked in with others more knowledgable about this issue per but:

Since the older Mac Pro's don't have Ultra SCSI on the motherboard but you can get a PCIe Ultra SCSI board that works for them - then this whole argument put forward by SvK's company IT guy could well be moot. 

It seems so long as the PCI bus is wide enough is should work OK. 
Nonetheless I will ask around as the opportunity presents itself. 

.


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## SvK (Aug 31, 2010)

Jack...

I'm going of of what my IT guys are saying...I myself don't know shit. It sounds reasonable, but there seem to be so many variables...

screw it....


Im buying HS right now, and I'll see how well it runs on my 1st gen MAC Pro with 16gig of RAM...

BTW Jack thanx for all your insight.

Here I go..
BRB 

SvK


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## SvK (Aug 31, 2010)

DONE...

I am now the proud owner of HS without the gear to run it .....

hahahahaha

SvK


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## Ashermusic (Sep 1, 2010)

OK, I talked to a tech support guy at Corsair, the maker of my SSD drive, and he said that SvK's IT guy is correct, getting a e_SATA III pci-e will not help at all, in fact could slow it down.

Further he said the issue is NOT a SAT III vs SATA II issue, that in fact my SSD drive is SAT II and there is only one SATA III SSD drive (a competitor's) on the market and that there is no significant difference.

He said that the drive is probably performing at a reasonably higher level than the FW drive but that the bottleneck is probably due to 1 or more of the following:

1. The OS, in this case Snow Leopard.

2, The app and /or the plug-in Play 2 in Logic and/or VE Pro.

3. The fact that the OS and Logic/Play2/VE Pro are all originating on a non-SSD boot drive (Jack does not buy this one)

Anyway, I am spending way too much time on this and not willing to spend much more time or money so Jimmy (or someone else) if you want to take it off my hands, let's do it.


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## Frederick Russ (Sep 1, 2010)

SvK @ Tue Aug 31 said:


> Asher thanx....
> 
> I'll be jammin' on the "Lites" rrrrrrr


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## Mike Connelly (Sep 1, 2010)

Ashermusic @ Wed Sep 01 said:


> OK, I talked to a tech support guy at Corsair, the maker of my SSD drive, and he said that SvK's IT guy is correct, getting a e_SATA III pci-e will not help at all, in fact could slow it down.
> 
> Further he said the issue is NOT a SAT III vs SATA II issue, that in fact my SSD drive is SAT II and there is only one SATA III SSD drive (a competitor's) on the market and that there is no significant difference.



That isn't agreeing with the IT guy. In your case SATA III isn't going to help because the drive you have isn't SATA III. That's totally different then the IT guy's comment that a SATA III card wouldn't provide SATA III speed for SATA III drives.

Hopefully I should have an SSD drive soon and when I do I'll test some things out. It should be possible to narrow down the bottleneck between OS/Logic/Plugins with a bit of troubleshooting.


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## Ashermusic (Sep 1, 2010)

Mike Connelly @ Wed Sep 01 said:


> Ashermusic @ Wed Sep 01 said:
> 
> 
> > OK, I talked to a tech support guy at Corsair, the maker of my SSD drive, and he said that SvK's IT guy is correct, getting a e_SATA III pci-e will not help at all, in fact could slow it down.
> ...



No he said that SATA III would not help even if it WAS a SATA III drive because the bottleneck is happening somewhere else.

Want to buy mine?


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## Mike Connelly (Sep 1, 2010)

Ashermusic @ Wed Sep 01 said:


> No he said that SATA III would not help even if it WAS a SATA III drive because the bottleneck is happening somewhere else.



That's kind of an odd claim to come from a tech guy for a company that doesn't even make a SATA III drive. Not to mention that it's hardly unbiased considering he's also saying that the other brand of drive isn't any faster even though the specs say otherwise.

I wonder what a tech from Crucial would say about the sata III thing.


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## Ashermusic (Sep 1, 2010)

Mike Connelly @ Wed Sep 01 said:


> Ashermusic @ Wed Sep 01 said:
> 
> 
> > No he said that SATA III would not help even if it WAS a SATA III drive because the bottleneck is happening somewhere else.
> ...



Fair point.


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## rgames (Sep 1, 2010)

Ashermusic @ Wed Sep 01 said:


> No he said that SATA III would not help even if it WAS a SATA III drive because the bottleneck is happening somewhere else.


Probably because it still goes through the PCI bus.

Processor and memory live on the very fast "frontside" bus but hard drives still have to push all their data through the good ol' PCI bus. If SATA II maxed out what could be sent through PCI it is very possible that SATA III doesn't buy anything.

The PCI bus spec is about 10 years old, so it's not surprising that we now have hard drives that saturate its bandwidth.

In fact, it makes perfect sense because SSD's are basically RAM, right? And do we send RAM through the PCI bus? No way - it would be severly bottlenecked.

rgames


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## Ashermusic (Sep 1, 2010)

Frederick Russ @ Wed Sep 01 said:


> Jay - why not hold onto that SSD and put it inside an i7 to run HS externally?



Uncle Sam has other plans for the $2000 or so that would take. And in all candor, the last 3 jobs I have scored were fairly intimate so at this point I am sticking with 1 computer.

My next plan is to buy another Western Caviar drive and split the HS load between them and see how that goes.


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## Mike Connelly (Sep 1, 2010)

This whole thread reminds me of one of the reasons I love LASS so much...


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## Nick Batzdorf (Sep 1, 2010)

I don't entirely buy that the PCI bus is the bottleneck. A quick look at apple-history.com shows that Jay's Mac has 16X PCI-express slots. The ones after that have PCI-express 2.0 16X slots available.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express

PCI-express v.1 is 250MB/sec PER LANE, and Jay's 2006 quad Mac Pro has 16-lane slots.

That doesn't mean there are no bottlenecks in the onboard SATA controller or even the Mac's firmware, but it seems highly unlikely that a PCI-express card that is compatible with Mac OS couldn't eat HS for breakfast.


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## Peter Alexander (Sep 1, 2010)

Mike Connelly @ Wed Sep 01 said:


> This whole thread reminds me of one of the reasons I love LASS so much...



That's the funniest thing I've read all day!


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## Peter Alexander (Sep 1, 2010)

The problem here really goes back to one of my last columns at Film Music Mag where I talked about the need to have clarity on this whole hard drive issue over and above SSD drives.

In the posts following the article is a comment which I'm summarizing: PLAY 2.x runs flawlessy on the 20 Mac Pros they test it on.

Mac Pro (best guess) = Dual Xeon

At Vienna, and confirmed in a conversation I had with ILIO, MIR runs optimally not with a single CPU, but with a Dual Xeon (the E5520).

On a separate thread over at Gearslutz, there's the confirmation from many that PLAY 2.x runs optimally on a Mac Pro Dual Xeon, while others have given positive testimony to the i7 Quad Cores.

Not scientific testing, but anecdotal evidence is that PLAY runs better on a single Quad Core or Six Core, and Best on a Dual Xeon. 

Any comments pro or con are opinions, which while they may be great opinions, are still speculative opinion because we don't know until an independent source runs some testing to tell us where best to put our CPU money.

DRIVES
Again, not scientific testing, but anecdotal testimony, which EW acknowledged in a thread on the Soundsonline forum, is that customers were getting great response with standard 7200RPM drives. This supports Jay's experience. 

So, by name for today, it appears (subjective analysis) that a Black Caviar WD 7200RPM Drive with 64MB cache for $99 should be pretty good!

Independent tests I found comparing a RAID 0 Black Caviar set up compared to a 10000 RPM drive to be better. I forgot where I read that, but I think I posted the link here in some other thread.

Per EW, in the manual, the optimum setup they tested was a RAID 0 with SSD drives. 

*CPUs and RAM*
i7 900 series supports up to 24GB on the motherboard according to Intel.
i7 800 series supports up to 32GB on the motherboard according to Intel
Quad Core Dual Xeon supports up to 144GB of RAM on the motherboard per Intel
Six Core Dual Xeon supports up to 288GB of RAM on the motherboard per Intel

*The Question*
Since PLAY 2.x reads all the RAM on a Win7 64 system (per EW), how much RAM is needed to load a full string template to record in one pass?

_The answer to that question will tell you if you need a Quad/Six Core or a Dual Xeon._

The closest answer we have is Nick writing that you need two (2) Mac Pros with 12GB of RAM running Hollywood Strings because that's how he's running it.

12 + 12 = 24GB RAM.

*LASS*
I checked with Andrew some months ago while I was planning my own system and found that you can load nearly ALL the 24-bit LASS samples into 24GB of RAM. Which means you can create a template with LASS in which you can record the strings in one pass.

Gabe Shadid wrote here that he has LASS on one small SSD drive using Plogue Bidule, an RME 9652 card, and MoL.

*Conclusion*
I'm still sorting this out for my own system! But if Caroline said to me, "Decide!" I'd go for a Dual Xeon system to hedge my bet for the long term RAM needs.

I would then assign drives/manufacturers so that one drive is Kontakt, one is Vienna, etc.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Sep 2, 2010)

I'm still very happy with my quad core dual Xeon Mac Pro, but the machine holds 32GB using 4GB chips. As far as I know that's the maximum.


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## NYC Composer (Sep 2, 2010)

Nick Batzdorf @ Thu Sep 02 said:


> I'm still very happy with my quad core dual Xeon Mac Pro, but the machine holds 32GB using 4GB chips. As far as I know that's the maximum.



I am happy with mine as well, but I really do wonder if it might run 8 gig chips.


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## ChrisAxia (Sep 2, 2010)

Hi guys,

I've only just got back into my studio after a long break, and now have the updated Play/HS. I've just opened up a cue which had legato patches for the five sections and that would NOT play without clicks or drop outs, even on the Crucial SSD. Well, the good news is that the update has clearly improved things as I can now play the same cue back with no clicks! This is within Bidule. Just when I was resigning myself to upgrade my PC to handle HS, I think I might be able to get away without it for a while...

I'm on a 2008 Dual Xeon Mac Pro. FYI, I ran DiskBench software, and the SSD outperforms my 7,200 drives by a long way. Between 2 and 7 times faster depending on block size, random/sequential read etc. At its best, it is achieving just over 240 Mb/sec.

~C


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## chrisr (Sep 2, 2010)

With a view to building my next PC I've been reading a couple of reviews of these SSD's recently and all pointed out that on-board Sata 2 _and Sata 3_ chips are a bottle neck for these drives - but that with the HighPoint Rocket 620LF PCI-Express card they were getting well over *300* Mb/sec reads.


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## Frederick Russ (Sep 2, 2010)

NYC Composer @ Thu Sep 02 said:


> Nick Batzdorf @ Thu Sep 02 said:
> 
> 
> > I'm still very happy with my quad core dual Xeon Mac Pro, but the machine holds 32GB using 4GB chips. As far as I know that's the maximum.
> ...



It will but they all need to 8GB chips - combining it with 4GB & 2GB chips in the same machine won't work. Technically you could have as much as 64GB in a Mac Pro.


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## rgames (Sep 2, 2010)

ChrisAxia @ Thu Sep 02 said:


> I'm on a 2008 Dual Xeon Mac Pro. FYI, I ran DiskBench software, and the SSD outperforms my 7,200 drives by a long way. Between 2 and 7 times faster depending on block size, random/sequential read etc.



Is that a single-stream read? If so, can DiskBench test multple streams? As mentioned above, single stream reads should be a good indicator but we really want to know how the drive handles multiple streams.



> At its best, it is achieving just over 240 Mb/sec.



I assume you mean MB/s (megaBYTES per second) and not Mb/s (megaBITS per second). Correct? Factor of 8 difference there 

rgames


----------



## ChrisAxia (Sep 2, 2010)

rgames @ Thu Sep 02 said:


> ChrisAxia @ Thu Sep 02 said:
> 
> 
> > I'm on a 2008 Dual Xeon Mac Pro. FYI, I ran DiskBench software, and the SSD outperforms my 7,200 drives by a long way. Between 2 and 7 times faster depending on block size, random/sequential read etc.
> ...



Yes, I did mean Mega Bytes!! Actually, it is called XBench not DiskBench and to my knowledge only does a single stream read. It's a free bit of software I found.

~C


----------



## rgames (Sep 2, 2010)

Ok - that's a bit more than double a typical 7200 drive (100 - 120 MB/s).

Seems like it ought to be more, right? Methinks there's something about SSD's we're still not getting because you could just replace the SSD with two 7200's and get the same bandwidth at much lower cost.

One point where the SSD might show significant advantage is transfer speed over the entire storage space. 7200's max at 100 - 120 MB/s but drop to maybe 80 MB/s over much of the disk space.

rgames


----------



## Frederick Russ (Sep 2, 2010)

rgames @ Thu Sep 02 said:


> Methinks there's something about SSD's we're still not getting because you could just replace the SSD with two 7200's and get the same bandwidth at much lower cost.



That was my thought as well. Doesn't Play require a Raid for more than one drive to stream HS though? Have they fixed that to allow more than one drive?


----------



## gsilbers (Sep 2, 2010)

rgames @ Thu Sep 02 said:


> Ok - that's a bit more than double a typical 7200 drive (100 - 120 MB/s).
> 
> Seems like it ought to be more, right? Methinks there's something about SSD's we're still not getting because you could just replace the SSD with two 7200's and get the same bandwidth at much lower cost.
> 
> ...



i think cost is the main problem. SSD can outperform HDD but the price x ratio is still not convincing for some of us, specially as u said of 2 7200rpm. 
but thats with any new tech. to be honest i havent had a problem with regular drives to be getting new tech. but maybe i havnt seen the light


----------



## Peter Alexander (Sep 2, 2010)

Frederick Russ @ Thu Sep 02 said:


> rgames @ Thu Sep 02 said:
> 
> 
> > Methinks there's something about SSD's we're still not getting because you could just replace the SSD with two 7200's and get the same bandwidth at much lower cost.
> ...



If I'm reading your question correctly, I asked that question of Nick Cardinal at EW and the answer is YES, you can spread HS over several drives within a system and boost the polyphony that way.

If the question is about RAID 0, on the Apple site you can get a RAID 0 config with 4 drives without a RAID card.

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## JohnG (Sep 2, 2010)

Frederick Russ @ 2nd September 2010 said:


> Doesn't Play require a Raid for more than one drive to stream HS though? Have they fixed that to allow more than one drive?



The short answer is "no," you don't need a RAID array to use more than one normal HDD. I spread different HS mic positions over two regular 7200 speed hard drives and it streamed correctly. Just for clarity, this was not a RAID, just two different drives on the same computer.

I also tried splitting the instruments up on two different drives and that worked too.

This was all on a PC.

I don't know what exactly happens if you have the entire library over two drives, whether it would somehow share the load, but then I guess one would go to RAID at that point anyway.


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## SvK (Sep 2, 2010)

Jay pm me your phone number now and lets paypal/fedex this thing.

SvK


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## SvK (Sep 2, 2010)

earth calling JAY..wanna buy yo DRIVE rights now baby!

SvK


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## Jack Weaver (Sep 2, 2010)

You might think that until you need a bassoon duo at your house at 3am!
:D 

.


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## Peter Alexander (Sep 2, 2010)

I think the answer today is:

1. MIR, Play 2.x (at least HS) - Dual Xeon

2. Kontakt, Vienna Instruments, Spectrasonics - i7

3. WD Caviar Black 1T 64MB Cache

Mac or PC


----------



## rabiang (Sep 2, 2010)

i did some checking on this when i built my system a few months ago. my conclusions were:

ssd is no point without sata III (not much anyway).

the best solution is to raid 1tb drives from seagate (as regarding to speed and cost pr gb). dont raid normal WD drives, they are not built for it. if 2 drives in raid is not enough for u, just raid 4, 2x2.

make a backup cycle on a separate drive.

the mb is of major importance in regards to bottlenecks. thats where the strength of the x58 comes in.

now, i am not a CS guy, so i cant explain all this in good terms, but these points are good guidelines for further study.

i am running 8-10 instances of kontakt, lass, requiem etc etc and it doesnt even touch the asio or the processor load bar. of course HS is more heavy, but still. my thinking as of now is make a good setup and u dont need big ssd's yet. go w raid'ed normal disks.


i am getting play with silk, ra QLSO etc today or tomorrow and will report on that.


----------



## Dan Mott (Sep 2, 2010)

Hence why there are hardly any user demos of HS. It's just too BIG! and not many users have the right system yet.

One composer would have to actually spend alot of time when it comes to using HS. It requires sitting down, spending atleast half an hour loading the legato patches and so forth. It's worth the wait, but it really stops ones motivation to produce with such a library. I mean, all of you would agree, sitting and loading patches is boring work, which would make one more lazy, or infact frustrated to load. Therefor, saying that, I'm sure many of you are combinding libraries, such as LASS with a little bit of HS because LASS apparently isn't so consuming, aswell as CS.

Funny thing is though, I could infact wait for these patches to load and I'd get great performance, but for those of you that have VE Pro need to check the CPU usage inside it. For me, the VE Pro CPU doesn't behave exactly like the normal computer's CPU and that's what is letting me down, and it would let you down too. Still need to go to the Vienna forums for this.

It's strange that an SSD isn't so convincing to me anymore after reading this thread. 

I know I'm not a professional or anything, but I just want to chip in and say if it's worth the wait, then just save your money and use a normal 7200 RPM drive. You'll only be waiting longer, but once everything is up and running, you'll be fine depeneding on your system. Remember, you'll only be waiting longer and I like to think waiting a little longer is better than spending a couple of grand on IMO overpriced product that only someone well off in the money area could afford. 

I have an i7 920 Quad. It holds up pretty well, but still I'm on the hunt for something that can handle really intense CPU situations. I mean really, who likes bouncing and bouncing midi tracks, then after a while realise that you want to cut that bit out and change a note, so you have to load the patch again and bounce. One, I would assume would want to work on their project from start to finish in midi so that if there are changes that can be made, then it's really easy. Just saying for those composers who like this kind of workflow.

I'd also suggest maybe trying to push your system to the limit and see exactly how many voices and plugins you can load before it starts to overload. This is what I did, just so I can make sure that maybe I didn't need an SSD, or a new CPU, ect. Like I said in another thread, I can only have 200 voices playing at a time from VE Pro and that's pretty shit house considering my system is pretty good, but I know it's VE Pro's fault because of the CPU, or something else is going wrong. I tried running as many voices as a could within Pro Tools and I had 600 Voices playing at a time on only 40 percent CPU, but unfortunatly Pro Tools is a 32bit app which is where VE Pro comes in. Therefor, I could have atleast 1200 odd voices playing at one time on 80 percent or so.

Dan.


----------



## Hannes_F (Sep 3, 2010)

Jack Weaver @ Fri Sep 03 said:


> You might think that until you need a bassoon duo at your house at 3am!



Hey Jack, I dig sampled bassoons at 3am ... these are mine:

http://www.strings-on-demand.com/demos/ ... umbers.mp3

However I am currently beginning to wonder a little about the effort/result ratio which seems more critical than a year ago, that is all I am saying. That being said I am learning a lot about configurations in this thread, so keep it coming.


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## NYC Composer (Sep 3, 2010)

Hannes, I was commenting to the missus just the other night about feeling bogged down by technology. 'You love technology!' she opined. My response was 'not when I feel mired in it, always reaching up for the brass ring and never catching it.'


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## JohnG (Sep 3, 2010)

I take a slightly alternate view. 

I think the excitement about SSDs and, in my case at least, HS, reflects a recognition that, after years of struggling with "almost-there" setups, gum-and-tape workarounds, and I-wish-I-could-just-write-music yearnings, we may be glimpsing technology that actually _solves_ a problem, rather than just slightly ameliorates it.

I suspect many will be willing to pay a very large price to stop fighting little skirmishes with technology but instead win a major breakthrough. Put differently, this situation offers a promise of expanding meaningfully the range of music that sounds nice (i.e. musical, natural, pleasant / dramatic / pleasing / enjoyable / effective) òp   ä‰Žp   ä‰p   ä‰p   ä‰‘p   ä‰’p   ä‰“p   ä‰”p   ä‰•p   ä‰–p   ä‰—p   ä‰˜p   ä‰™p   ä‰šp   ä‰›p   ä‰œp   ä‰p   ä‰žp   ä‰Ÿp   ä‰ p   ä‰¡p   ä‰¢


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## SvK (Sep 3, 2010)

Hi all....

Jay Asher just sold me is SSD. Jay went to the FEDEX office within minutes of my PAyPal transfer....

Great guy to do business with,

best,

SvK


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## Ashermusic (Sep 3, 2010)

SvK @ Fri Sep 03 said:


> Hi all....
> 
> Jay Asher just sold me is SSD. Jay went to the FEDEX office within minutes of my PAyPal transfer....
> 
> ...



Thank you Steven and right back at c'ha.


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## gsilbers (Sep 4, 2010)

rabiang @ Sat Sep 04 said:


> i know many of u are older than 40. me too, around that age. the point is: we all started making music when we couldnt even dream of doing what we do today. is it hard? yes. is it annoying sometimes? yes. is it the greatest thing that happened in my life for many years? YES!



what?! 

does that relate to anything in this thread? did u post in the right thread? 
i agree with you i just dunno where the comment stems from.


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## Mike Connelly (Sep 4, 2010)

rgames @ Thu Sep 02 said:


> Ok - that's a bit more than double a typical 7200 drive (100 - 120 MB/s).



I'm not sure where you got those numbers but they seem really high. The best I've seen for any single drive is about 85, even two raptors in raid 0 don't get much past 120.

And that is best case which is sustained transfer. With sample playback there's also going to be a lot of random reads, and SSD has even more of an advantage when it comes to seek times. Raid may help that a little, but still not even in the same ballpark as SSD.

There definitely seem to be users out there who have seen a huge improvement with SSD, beyond what is possible with conventional drives in a raid. Just not with the combo of HS/Mac.


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## rabiang (Sep 4, 2010)

gsilbers @ Sun Sep 05 said:


> rabiang @ Sat Sep 04 said:
> 
> 
> > i know many of u are older than 40. me too, around that age. the point is: we all started making music when we couldnt even dream of doing what we do today. is it hard? yes. is it annoying sometimes? yes. is it the greatest thing that happened in my life for many years? YES!
> ...




hehe. lets call it improvisation


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## rabiang (Sep 4, 2010)

Mike Connelly @ Sun Sep 05 said:


> rgames @ Thu Sep 02 said:
> 
> 
> > Ok - that's a bit more than double a typical 7200 drive (100 - 120 MB/s).
> ...




when u evaluate ssd u must take into account the price pr gb. of course ssd's are better than normal disks. but you can get very fast speeds with raid arrays. and if you dont consider your MB's specs, you will def find yourself lost in a heap of confusing roadblocks. 

as of my understanding:

assuming an x58 MB: 

ssd matters but if you raid them you will not see an advantage because it goes over the SATA II speed. 

as such: if you only have SATA II, raid0 HD's will give you the same speed (or close) to a ssd, but much bigger. 

if you have SATA III: you can even raid0 ssd's and get some truly sick performance. however, you dont like money(or have too much) if you go for this option.


as of today: i think the best solution is ssd as OS disk and normal raid0 as the other disks.


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## Mike Connelly (Sep 4, 2010)

rabiang @ Sat Sep 04 said:


> if you only have SATA II, raid0 HD's will give you the same speed (or close) to a ssd, but much bigger.



I'd like to see a benchmark showing a raid at the same speed as one of the faster SSDs. Two drives don't seem to come anywhere close, how many drives in raid 0 would it take to reach the 250-300 range?

And again, seek time/random read is an entirely different issue than maximum throughput and there are huge differences even between a raid of drives and a single SSD, even on sata2.


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## rabiang (Sep 4, 2010)

my choice was not made on speed only. 

you are probably right, its not possible to get a raid0 very close to an ssd. but most people must take a number of gb for a certain amount of money into account too. but this is changing really fast obv.

please accept my apologies if i mislead someone in this regard.


i would still stand by the "or close" comment.  raid0 lags behind ssd, but i just wanted to get some attention to the fact that they are not that far apart, and raid0 offers far bigger storage.


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## Mike Connelly (Sep 4, 2010)

I've seen benchmarks that put a raid 0 of two 10k drives at around 120 which is less than half that of SSD. And the difference with seek time/random read is even more.

I wouldn't consider that anywhere close to ssd, if someone is getting even close to ssd speeds with a raid I'd be curious to see the benchmark and the specifics of the setup.


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## JohnG (Sep 4, 2010)

+1


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## rabiang (Sep 4, 2010)

yes, i am not trying to downgrade ssd. its just that some underestimate the importance of MB, Raid, pure gb/$ etc.

my point was also partly about that one cant put a sata II ssd in a raid and expect a performance increase. its just not possible. thats one of the reasons i wanted to wait a bit with ssd. 

but, we are dealing with 2 very different things here: theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge. for example: whats the price of running all the libs on ssd? whats the price of the same on raid0? backups? performance comparisons with a single system compared with a dual ve pro system? 

i am not saying i know the answer. i am just saying i have 2tb in raid0 that cost be $150 and run pretty damn fast.

And if you have ONE lib that cant run on a i7 stand alone pc, i say: forget the lib. there is something seriously wrong with the lib. Its either way: they might have designed it like that on purpose or not on purpose. i couldnt care less. but i do care if i get asio problems the second i add a software and use one instance (this happened to me). We like to blame it all on hardware. But seriously: there is some really buggy software out there too.

use the better libs, support the better programmers and companies. longterm its all for your own good.


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## JohnG (Sep 4, 2010)

So, you're saying EW isn't one of the "better" companies?

Dude, pardon me, but you sound like someone who has no skin in this game, and who's done no real research, and who's just musing aloud, uninformed.

These HS/SSD threads, by and large, come from people trying to optimise performance.

What they are NOT about is whether or not HS "works." It does. The library sounds beautiful as a plugin on my 4-processor Mac, spinning on a 7200 speed drive, on a 32 bit DAW. It delivers a lot more notes / voices / mic positions on a good, standalone computer. You're drawing too many negative inferences from posts of people seeking the ultimate performance.

In fact, you have it upside down, in my opinion. The heated pursuit of the best systems available is spurred by those pursuing the full beauty of the sound, not overcoming weakness of the library. HS may be a bear, but to my ears and, apparently, to others' as well, it's nothing short of a stunning achievement.


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## NYC Composer (Sep 4, 2010)

JohnG @ Sat Sep 04 said:


> So, you're saying EW isn't one of the "better" companies?
> 
> Dude, pardon me, but you sound like someone who has no skin in this game, and who's done no real research, and who's just musing aloud, uninformed.
> 
> ...



As counterpoint, John, EW has consistently overpromised and often not delivered. Play was a longtime debacle, Word Builder is STILL under construction, under-specing EWQLSO made my composing life weird and difficult and the replies to these issues involved stonewalling and over-sensitivity.

I own scads of EW products. They do fantastic work, and perhaps the sins of the past should remain in the past. Despite the many achievements of the company, however, I remain skeptical of any performance claims.


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## Mike Connelly (Sep 4, 2010)

I'd agree with that, while EW does a fantastic job of recording the samples, there's no question that there have been some problems with the programming over the years, especially with the switch from Kontakt to PLAY.

Frankly I"m shocked they'd release a library this demanding without a 64 bit player on both platforms to run it, and I think it's likely that's a factor in the disparity between SSD performance between mac and pc with this library.


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## rabiang (Sep 4, 2010)

JohnG @ Sun Sep 05 said:


> So, you're saying EW isn't one of the "better" companies?
> 
> Dude, pardon me, but you sound like someone who has no skin in this game, and who's done no real research, and who's just musing aloud, uninformed.
> 
> ...



if you want this forum to be about never saying what all ppl know then its fine and i will not contribute. play is very bad software. i never said anything about anything else. of course their sounds are great, i love em. 

yes, i probably overstated raid0 speed. sorry. if you want to crucify me for that and start calling me names, ok. 

"Dude, pardon me, but you sound like someone who has no skin in this game, and who's done no real research, and who's just musing aloud, uninformed."

i overstated one thing, and you nail me to the wall like a person who does nothing good. ok, john.


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## Animus (Sep 4, 2010)

I am with rablong here. I think there might be problems with Plays streaming engine. I easliy can load the full Mixosaurus Kit A with all round robins and all mics at a 24k buffer in Kontakt off just a regular SATA II 7200 drive and it doesn't break a sweat, even while running several Vienna instruments and some other random instruments in Kontakt.


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## Ashermusic (Sep 5, 2010)

Animus @ Sat Sep 04 said:


> I am with rablong here. I think there might be problems with Plays streaming engine. I easliy can load the full Mixosaurus Kit A with all round robins and all mics at a 24k buffer in Kontakt off just a regular SATA II 7200 drive and it doesn't break a sweat, even while running several Vienna instruments and some other random instruments in Kontakt.



I am not sure Play 2 is the culprit here. I suspect HS would require the same resources regardless of which sample engine it was utilizing.

But like John G says, the sound is worth it.


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## Stephen Baysted (Sep 5, 2010)

JohnG @ Sun Sep 05 said:


> So, you're saying EW isn't one of the "better" companies?
> 
> Dude, pardon me, but you sound like someone who has no skin in this game, and who's done no real research, and who's just musing aloud, uninformed.
> 
> ...




+1. That I'm seriously considering devoting a new monster spec PC just for HS is testament to how impressed I am with the sound of it. Yes of course I wish it ran like LASS or VSL, but the fact is it doesn't. A bit of effort and a few longwinded work arounds means that it can do most things I want, so it's time consuming but ultimately worth the hassle (just). 

Cheers

Stephen


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## rabiang (Sep 5, 2010)

The point isnt really who is right and who is wrong. There seems to be a huge lack of respect for the dialectic way of communication these days. its more important to be right in the first post than finding better solutions together. why? because we use these social networks for business, and create ideas of who we are. we can use the newbies to create our own identity as something more sophisticated.

People should care more about reaching goals, finding info, making each other better. instead we use the net to make business, support our identities, crash down on small mistakes with emotional responses etc.

some people like to write a post 10 times before they send it, and think very hard before every decision. lets call this classical. then there are ppl who like to talk, can write without having everything thought out and will make more mistakes than the classical type. call the last jazz. is jazz a terrible way of life? is dialectics a bad way to increase knowledge? do we need to hate and give ppl bad names on forums where we know most ppl are decent humans?

this is not only related to john's response to me. there are so many worse examples, also on this forum. one example is the recent disgrace in the jbacal thread.


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## NYC Composer (Sep 5, 2010)

rabiang @ Sun Sep 05 said:


> The point isnt really who is right and who is wrong. There seems to be a huge lack of respect for the dialectic way of communication these days. its more important to be right in the first post than finding better solutions together. why? because we use these social networks for business, and create ideas of who we are. we can use the newbies to create our own identity as something more sophisticated.
> 
> People should care more about reaching goals, finding info, making each other better. instead we use the net to make business, support our identities, crash down on small mistakes with emotional responses etc.
> 
> ...



John is one of the most civil people on this forum. I thought his post was an anomaly.

In general though, civil online exchanges remain challenging because in the exchange of ideas and information, people seem to have a need to establish primacy.

This is only my opinion, of course-I could be wrong (although, it's not bloody likely). :wink:


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## Mike Connelly (Sep 5, 2010)

Ashermusic @ Sun Sep 05 said:


> I am not sure Play 2 is the culprit here. I suspect HS would require the same resources regardless of which sample engine it was utilizing.



That is a possibility, but HS seems to utilize SSD much better on the PC side. If I'm able to get an SSD I'll see what comparisons I can do with Kontakt and other things, maybe none of them will max out the SSD on mac, or maybe some will.


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## Animus (Sep 5, 2010)

So how many voices does HS stream with all mics on in a typical legato patch?


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## Hannes_F (Sep 5, 2010)

OK here is a suggestion for all of you Hollywood Strings users. Make a petition to East West in order to release an mp3 version of HS. Seriously!

The mp3 samples could be used for realtime playing or massaging the midi. Then for rendering in a non-realtime high definition mode the 24 bit samples would be streamed directly from disk, no pre-buffering involved. Since Play is their own product I think they could implement that.

Technically the pre-load part of the samples would sit in the RAM still compressed, so the unpacking would only take place when a sample is really played back. Same for the streamed part of the mp3 samples, they would be transported as mp3 (compressed) through the system just until when the player needs to deliver it to the DAW. You would still need an i7 or equivalent for the realtime unpacking and processing but in realtime mode the data streaming bottleneck would be avoided. Also you would have a much lower loading time until you are ready to compose.

Well, maybe I should have tried to get a patent on this but there you have it 8) :mrgreen:


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## Stephen Baysted (Sep 5, 2010)

Animus @ Sun Sep 05 said:


> So how many voices does HS stream with all mics on in a typical legato patch?



With Celli Legato Slur patch, I am peaking at 64 voices slurring between 2 notes with only the Mid and mains on; 98 voices peaking with 2 notes mid, main and close mics; 128 voices peaking with all mics on (and the inevitable popping and clicking like a bastard occurs). RAM with this particular celli legato patch is only at 2.36 GB. 

As I wrote earlier in this thread, another examples is the Celli sustain patches. If you play a 4 note chord holding notes down shows 52 voices, on release this jumps to 64. If you hold down 6 notes you get 72 voices, on release 96. 

RAM is not the issue here. 

Cheers

Stephen


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## Animus (Sep 6, 2010)

Rousseau @ Sun Sep 05 said:


> Animus @ Sun Sep 05 said:
> 
> 
> > So how many voices does HS stream with all mics on in a typical legato patch?
> ...



cool, thanks for the info


THough I probably personally wouldn't need to hold down more than one note on a string section as in essence you would double the size from a 16 violin section to a 32 violin one, holding down 4 notes would be a 64 note section for example. So if you did this on all the string sections you would have a 200+ piece string orchestra. 

Seems like what they should have done is provided 16 bit versions on the retail harddrive and programmed in some script where you could load each on the fly. 16 bit for composing and 24 bit for rendering.


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## Animus (Sep 7, 2010)

So I decided to get onboard with this HS train see what all the hoopla is about. I was able to get a 10% Labor Day discount over a retailer had this weekend. $1350. Not bad. Now off to look at SSDs.


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## twinsinmind (Sep 9, 2010)

I have a question and i hope to get an answer:

While we all know that HS comes in as a 320gb library, i see that its hard or impossible to get a SSD from this size. Can someone tell me how you guys manage to run this on a 256 gb drive?

maybe a stupid question and i suspect that the answer will be somewhere in splitting the samples up. but please
tell me .

thanks


----------



## Animus (Sep 9, 2010)

Holy smokes. Just installed my new RealSSD 128 gb. Got a Asus Sata III pci-e card to run it off. This drive benches around 360 mb/sec read speeds! In comparison, my striped raptor drives in the same system read at 140 mb/sec. Over twice as fast as striped Raptors and about 8 times faster than my Sata II 7200 drives. Exciting. Now if this tech just becomes cheaper.

I should be getting HS in the next 2 days and will get to testing.


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## JohnG (Sep 9, 2010)

twinsinmind @ 9th September 2010 said:


> I have a question and i hope to get an answer:
> 
> While we all know that HS comes in as a 320gb library, i see that its hard or impossible to get a SSD from this size. Can someone tell me how you guys manage to run this on a 256 gb drive?
> 
> ...



you can run two or three mic positions off the SSD from a 256; maybe four on some of the articulations.

I haven't heard of anyone using more than two or at most three mic positions at a time.

The trick is though that some of the articulations seem to grab from other mic positions, so I'm not sure it's a strict hierarchy.


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## Frederick Russ (Sep 9, 2010)

Animus @ Thu Sep 09 said:


> Holy smokes. Just installed my new RealSSD 128 gb. Got a Asus Sata III pci-e card to run it off. This drive benches around 360 mb/sec read speeds! In comparison, my striped raptor drives in the same system read at 140 mb/sec. Over twice as fast as striped Raptors and about 8 times faster than my Sata II 7200 drives. Exciting. Now if this tech just becomes cheaper.
> 
> I should be getting HS in the next 2 days and will get to testing.



Wow great specs! Looking forward to hearing how this works out for you.


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## SvK (Sep 9, 2010)

I know nada about RAiD 0 , but want to buy 2 more SSDs (128gig) in addition to my 256 SSd and go "RAID 0" with a controller card (?)

Price points for these cards vary greatly. What should I spend? Minimum....

Please short answers...Not "geeked out look how smart I am rants" 
Thanx,

SvK


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## SvK (Sep 9, 2010)

Btw the performance of my single ssd is insane..

SvK


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## Nick Batzdorf (Sep 9, 2010)

Insane good or insane waste of money?


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## SvK (Sep 9, 2010)

Oh

Nick insane good!!

I bought HS and made a template with slur legato patches

On the Big slur legato patches, holding down one note triggers 13 voices (each voice is stereo 24bit)

So I record enabled:

1st Vi leg A
1st Vi leg B

2nd VI leg A
2nd Vi leg B

Violas Leg A
Violas Leg B

Celii Leg A
Celli Leg B

Basses


That's 9 x 13 = 107

No to mention release triggers


this over VE Pro on a 

intel Core 2 Quad with 8 gig RAM

Hoe that helps

Ps: running Main Decca tree only


Best,

SvK


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## twinsinmind (Sep 9, 2010)

JohnG @ Fri Sep 10 said:


> twinsinmind @ 9th September 2010 said:
> 
> 
> > I have a question and i hope to get an answer:
> ...



Thank you my friend. o-[][]-o


----------



## Ian Livingstone (Sep 10, 2010)

Thought I'd share experiences with my new PLAY standalone machine - i7 950, 24gb Ram, SSD Sata 6Gbs here's the components.

£221.99 x 2 - OCZ Gold Low Voltage 12GB (3x4GB) DDR3 10666C9 1333MHz Triple Channel (OCZ3G1333LV12GK)
£204.25 x 2 - Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB 2.5" SATA 6Gbs Solid State Hard Drive (CTFDDAC128MAG-1G1)
£199.99 x 1 - Intel Core i7 950 3.06GHz (Bloomfield) (Socket LGA1366) - Retail
£127.65 x 1 - Asus P6X58D-E Intel X58 (Socket 1366) DDR3 Motherboard
£25.52 x 1 - Asus GeForce 8400GS 512MB DDR2 Low Profile PCI-Express Graphics Card 

Here's the current situation:-

Tested first on a standard 7200 SATAII drive - loaded up 3 x the biggest "Legato Powerful System" patches (Leg BC Slur + Port) Vln1, Vln2 Vla and tried to play simultaneously - lots of clicks. So I moved the Main + Divis sample folders over to the SSD drive, reloaded the 3 patches forcing PLAY to re-find the samples, and STILL lots of clicks.

Good news is looking at the resource monitor the CPU is hardly breaking a sweat - around 10%, so it does seem that i7 is up to the job, but is a 6Gps SSD drive really not fast enough for playing just 3 legato patches?

One thought is that as I only have 128gb SSD drive (showing as 119gb in windows) - HS uses 116gb of this for the Main and DIV mics folders, could performance be compromised because the SSD drive is nearly full? I wouldn't have thought the old "keep 10% drive space free" rule applies to SSD though but correct me if I'm wrong....

Ian


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## chimuelo (Sep 10, 2010)

Ian if you are on a PC I would be happy to remove your clicks and pops.
I only ask you join Skype just for the fast free texting.
PM me as I have just finished doing this in 32bit WIndows 7 and 64bit.
The problem is that we have USB COntrollers, SATA controllers and even Video cards all sharing the same interupt requests.
One must isolate the sound card from these audio killing devices.
This even slows down SSD transfers. Sometimes w/o hearing the audio crackling.

CIaoMein....


----------



## Ashermusic (Sep 10, 2010)

SvK @ Thu Sep 09 said:


> Oh
> 
> Nick insane good!!
> 
> ...



Well I am glad the drive is performing so much better for you than it was for me Steven. It must be a PC/Windows advantage over a Mac/OSX thing I guess.


----------



## Animus (Sep 10, 2010)

Ashermusic @ Fri Sep 10 said:


> SvK @ Thu Sep 09 said:
> 
> 
> > Oh
> ...



I don't think it was the drive in your case but the fact that you were running it is as Sata II. Also, even if you had Sata III that Icy Dock adapter is only Sata II as well.


----------



## Brobdingnagian (Sep 10, 2010)

You are a kind and generous man for taking the time to share and post this, Chimuelo.

Many thanks.


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## SvK (Sep 10, 2010)

Animus....

my bad...I'm wrong on that. It still is just 13 voices (since slur vs bc or port are accessed through velocity amount)

its 13 regardless.....

SvK


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## José Herring (Sep 10, 2010)

SvK @ Fri Sep 10 said:


> Jose... not dissapointing at all
> They just need to make some more keyswitch patches to switch between port / slur / bc INSTEAD of the stack presets that use to many voices...
> 
> There is NOTHING disappointing about this library.
> ...



That's good to know. 

With a kid to raise going to private school, I've become a tight wad with my money. Before I pluck down the $5000 or so that I'll need to get this library fully up and running, I want to know if the dang thing is going to work. I appreciate all the info you and others are giving.


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## Animus (Sep 10, 2010)

SvK @ Fri Sep 10 said:


> Animus....
> 
> my bad...I'm wrong on that. It still is just 13 voices (since slur vs bc or port are accessed through velocity amount)
> 
> ...




Cool.

I am waiting today on the Fedex guy to come to my door with HS so I will get to join in on the fray soon enough.

It still seems to me that EW should have had an additional 16 bit alternative you could load on the fly.


----------



## Animus (Sep 10, 2010)

Frederick Russ @ Thu Sep 09 said:


> Animus @ Thu Sep 09 said:
> 
> 
> > Holy smokes. Just installed my new RealSSD 128 gb. Got a Asus Sata III pci-e card to run it off. This drive benches around 360 mb/sec read speeds! In comparison, my striped raptor drives in the same system read at 140 mb/sec. Over twice as fast as striped Raptors and about 8 times faster than my Sata II 7200 drives. Exciting. Now if this tech just becomes cheaper.
> ...



well this is my first PLAY library so honestly i am sort of nervous about it. I have always "heard" things about Play but it will be good to finally experience it myself.


----------



## rabiang (Sep 10, 2010)

This thread is a huge disappointment. 

John wants only very serious replies with no mistakes, but only if it doesnt involve eastwest (ban me, john, go ahead). 

ppl like to accuse others of mistakes, but dont correct when wrong (e.g. mike who said that a Raid0 w normal disks can only reach around 120 gb/s, when in fact i reported 200 just a few days later). many of you guys pretend to care about facts. you dont, u care about virtual friendships and business.

no one replies to the "serious responses", one example is one i gave a few days ago.

others want simple info, not hard to understand....they say: "dont give geek info". 


and the readers dont want to defend decency, because it might mess with a mod.

a complete failure as a forum, if u ask me, except for a few like NYC composer etc.


try again VI,

rabiang


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## SvK (Sep 10, 2010)

rabiang.....
"don't give geek info" I was being funny.We nerds tend to fall in love with the sound of our own knowledge and before you know it have written a book instead of simply answering a question....

ANIMUS:

Have fun with the library, get ready for a long week-end, but once you have a template set up you'll love it.

best,

SvK


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## SvK (Sep 10, 2010)

"Legato Powerful System 2020" 

haha

SvK


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## JohnG (Sep 10, 2010)

Ian Livingstone @ 10th September 2010 said:


> SvK - these 9 simultaneous legato patches - are they the "8 Legato Powerful System" patches (Leg BC Slur + Port)? ie. the biggest ones there are?
> 
> I can only manage 3 on this new build before it starts breaking up.
> I can manage alot more of the LT patches without the BC and Ports.
> ...



Hi Ian,

You may already be doing this, but in order to take advantage of the multiple processors, TJ recommends that we put each of the massive patches on its own instance of PLAY. That made a decisive difference to my performance with the library.

I see that your CPUs aren't registering problems, so maybe you are already doing this.

Separately, you might investigate what percentage of your RAM are you using. I don't know how much headroom you need to leave for the system, but I would guess there's a practical upper limit.


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## SvK (Sep 10, 2010)

HIan,

On my PC 

I am running 4 instances of VE Pro
EACh VE Pro has 1 instance of PLAY in it.

This way I maximize my uses of my 4 cores

SO

Violins 1+2
Violas
Celli
Basses

best,

SvK


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## SvK (Sep 10, 2010)

ANd IAN

One MIC position at a time
the others get rendered later.

its all well laid out in the manual.

SvK


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## NYC Composer (Sep 10, 2010)

Ian Livingstone @ Fri Sep 10 said:


> Guys - I think I've got to the route of my problem with these big patches - I've got my asio buffer size set to 128(3ms) as I have my other 7 Kontakt machines, but TJ tells me that's way to low and I should be on 512(12ms) for HS as the scripts need more headroom.
> Haven't had time to check but I'm sure that'll be all it is.
> I'm running HS in standalone as the multicore seems way more efficient to me than multiple vst instances in Bidule.
> I've been using HS since May with the 12LT patches on a lower spec machine but always wondered what I was missing with the big ones hence these tests.
> ...



12 ms meaning 12 in, 12 out, equalling 24ms, yes?


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## JohnG (Sep 10, 2010)

My buffer is set at 256. I am using Bidule with multiple Play instances. 

Sounds as though I need to re-read the manual too.


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## Craig Sharmat (Sep 10, 2010)

rabiang @ Fri Sep 10 said:


> This thread is a huge disappointment.
> 
> John wants only very serious replies with no mistakes, but only if it doesnt involve eastwest (ban me, john, go ahead).
> 
> ...





Well no one asked you

If you don't like this place go somewhere you like better.

If you decide otherwise put up with the different personalities here.

Mods are posters too and entitled to opinions. you will not be banned for giving yours but you will do better here without antagonizing posts.


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## rabiang (Sep 10, 2010)

y, i am done ranting 

i was talking about this thread, not the forum in general. the forum is great, lots of good info and some nice people too.


summary for those that dont wanna read the whole thing:

its rare to see such blatant ignorance of knowledge and decency among intelligent people. a mod came flying out attacking all i have written because i commented on a software (who happens to be an important company in this business). then i refute all his attacks, and provided evidence that what i wrote was true (e.g. the speed of raid0 on normal disks). and then he doesnt comment or gives an apology.


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## Stephen Baysted (Sep 11, 2010)

Ian Livingstone @ Fri Sep 10 said:


> Guys - I think I've got to the route of my problem with these big patches - I've got my asio buffer size set to 128(3ms) as I have my other 7 Kontakt machines, but TJ tells me that's way to low and I should be on 512(12ms) for HS as the scripts need more headroom.
> Haven't had time to check but I'm sure that'll be all it is.
> I'm running HS in standalone as the multicore seems way more efficient to me than multiple vst instances in Bidule.
> I've been using HS since May with the 12LT patches on a lower spec machine but always wondered what I was missing with the big ones hence these tests.
> ...




So it's not real time then; 12ms is pretty much unplayable IMO. But if it works substantially better with an offline render/playback render then it might be worth giving it a go before I invest in SSDs for this. 

Cheers
Stephen


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## northspeed (Oct 10, 2010)

JohnG @ Sun Aug 29 said:


> I'm just catching up here too, but this is roughly what others have told me:
> 
> I am almost certain that I read a Doug Rogers post that hardware RAID had delivered the best performance for a test that VisionDAW ran for EW, but then one doesn't know whether Doug has perfect knowledge either, or how exactly VisionDAW ran the test or what they were doing exactly when they ran it -- what kind of benchmarking they actually did.



I think Doug Rogers was referring to the OCZ Z-Drive R2 SSD that sit on a PCIe card which have their own RAID controller onboard. By doing this they bypass the SATA bottlenecks.

This is why I went for the OCZ Revodrive which has the same design, slighlty less performance but half the price. It's still a lot faster than a normal 3.5" SATA SSD. Of course you could run 2x SSD's on a RAID controller. Never tried that. Revodrive seems to be less headache.


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## José Herring (Oct 10, 2010)

Is the Revodrive working for you? What voice counts can you get with it?


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## northspeed (Oct 10, 2010)

Still finishing setup of my new system. Built a new slave with VE Pro (24GB Ram, Revo, SSD for system). Reading the HS manual etc. All new to me!! Will report back when I have some real performance data with Play...

It's a lot to take in first!


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## tripit (Oct 17, 2010)

Hey Jay, have you had a chance to try the 2 WD 64's yet?

I just got the HS gold on a mac drive. Haven't put it in yet, waiting to finish up delivering a score this week before I can take a break and tear into my rig. 

Question for you HS guys. I'm thinking of either going to go with an OWC SSD or two and put them in my 08 MacPro 8 core or I can put it onto one of my PC slaves. I have a quad core 2.6 that currently carries my LASS. I can move LASS back onto the MacPro and use the quad for HS, but I'm not sure it's worth it because the PC only has 8 gigs of ram. The other choice I have, but is more time consuming and expensive is to rebuild one of my other older PC slaves into an i7 and put it there. 

I know Jay didn't find the SSD to be all that good in the mac and I'm just trying to look at all the possibilities. Who has HS running on a Mac and what are the results?
Thanks.


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## Ashermusic (Oct 18, 2010)

tripit @ Sun Oct 17 said:


> Hey Jay, have you had a chance to try the 2 WD 64's yet?
> 
> I just got the HS gold on a mac drive. Haven't put it in yet, waiting to finish up delivering a score this week before I can take a break and tear into my rig.
> 
> ...



Yes, I am using the 2 WD 64 drives and they are performing well. I think the 64 cache makes a considerable difference and it is hard to argue with the price.

HS is still a little demanding for my now under-powered 1st gen quad core so I have to strategize but it is worth it for that sound.


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## Mike Connelly (Oct 18, 2010)

Just got SSD, and it has the wrong size connector for my machine. Off in search of an adapter...


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## tripit (Oct 18, 2010)

Ashermusic @ Mon Oct 18 said:


> Yes, I am using the 2 WD 64 drives and they are performing well. I think the 64 cache makes a considerable difference and it is hard to argue with the price.
> 
> HS is still a little demanding for my now under-powered 1st gen quad core so I have to strategize but it is worth it for that sound.



Thanks for the reply. Good to hear it's working better for you. 
I was about to do the same, but I just went ahead this afternoon for the OWC SSD. I figure if I can't get reasonable performance on the Mac, I'll just move HS over to my quad PC.


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## NYC Composer (Oct 19, 2010)

NYC Composer @ Fri Sep 10 said:


> Ian Livingstone @ Fri Sep 10 said:
> 
> 
> > Guys - I think I've got to the route of my problem with these big patches - I've got my asio buffer size set to 128(3ms) as I have my other 7 Kontakt machines, but TJ tells me that's way to low and I should be on 512(12ms) for HS as the scripts need more headroom.
> ...



?


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