# More about SSDs on Mac vs. Windows 7



## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 1, 2011)

I'm still trying to get to the bottom of this (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde).

Has anyone with an SSD on Mac tried turning off journaling?

I posted the following on MacInTouch yesterday and got an interesting reply.



Nick Batzdorf wrote:

But on on Macs the reported performance is pretty much in the ballpark of Apple's claims: "up to" 2x the performance.

So far nobody I've spoken to (including two engineers in the field) has been able to offer an explanation for the disparity.

Geoff Strickler:

HFS+ has relatively high overhead, and Apple's implementation may not be optimal. This type of limited file system performance has been noted on Macs using HFS+ for some time. Formatting the drive with another supported file system might help, but I haven't seen any tests of that.


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## Mike Connelly (Feb 3, 2011)

Interesting idea. Does journaling make any difference when you're just reading from disk? I thought it was mainly a write feature.


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## Mike Connelly (Feb 3, 2011)

Can't get journaling turned off with my ssd, it's supposed to be possible with Disk Utility - it's not in the menu but it's a hidden feature that's supposed to appear when you hold down option, but not working on my machine.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 3, 2011)

According to Someone Who Knows, journaling is only for writing (it keeps track of changes), so it shouldn't make a difference after all.

However, I do wonder about HFS+. Maybe using HFS would be better, since the blocks are larger. Or maybe even that Windows format (is it FAT? I forget) would be better.

Just trying to figure out why SSDs would be so much worse on Macs than Windows.


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## Mike Connelly (Feb 3, 2011)

Since things like Kontakt only load 60k preload per sample (and that can be lower with a really fast drive), I would think that smaller blocks would be better. I was under the impression that SSD usually used 64k blocks regardless of formatting - but that's the impression I got from various things I've read, I could be totally wrong.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 3, 2011)

I wish I had an SSD drive and a modern Windows machine to test this stuff on.

After locating Geoff Strickler on Facebook to thank him for his reply, I had an exchange and this is what he suggested:



> FAT performance degrades somewhat with volume size due to the size of the allocation table. SSD will minimize the impact of that, but won't eliminate it. That's why I suggest testing with a relatively small volume. If the FAT volume is faster, then you might try a larger FAT volume to see if the performance stays high.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 3, 2011)

...posted as if I actually know about allocation table sizes are. 

(I assume those are blocks?)


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## Mike Connelly (Feb 4, 2011)

I thought that FAT wasn't used much any more, mainly things like memory sticks, and that windows drives were mostly NTFS these days.

I'd be surprised if any of the windows formats gave better performance on mac, but it would be interesting to try.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 4, 2011)

I think FAT is the only one Mac reads natively?


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## Mike Connelly (Feb 5, 2011)

From what I've read, seems like mac can read or write on FAT and exFAT and can read NTFS although supposedly the NTFS write support is there but disabled an can be turned on fairly easily.


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## Ashermusic (Feb 6, 2011)

This was posted by Michiel Post of EW:

_"First of all, let me apologize for any confusion here; I am speaking strictly on personal title here as an owner of 6 Macs and 5 PC's for music work. I run Cubase, Nuendo, Logic, ProTools and many other programs and consider myself highly aware of current state of technology. The Mac platform currently is far behind Linux and Windows platforms. Period. Both hardware and software simply stay behind. And this combined with the hefty price tag, makes me say that the current state of the Mac platform is not so good. 
Mainstream hardware developments that currently allow superior computing performance include a.o. USB3, SSD, on-board RAID-controller, high-speed SATA 6Gb/s. Apple fails to optimize systems for all of these new technologies. 
- USB3 is only possible with 3th party PCI or Express cards and Apple fails to support the USB3 standard. With iMacs and Mac Books that are lacking eSATA, the only standard way of connecting external storage is FireWire or USB2, USB2 is ten times slower than USB3. This alone makes it almost impossible to use iMac, MiniMac, MacBooks and all except the 17-inch MacBookPro's for serious music applications. The 17'MBP accepts an express card, so you can add eSATA and currently also LaCie USB3 solutions. But USB3 is limited in speed here due to lack of Apple support. 
- SSD; Apple sells units with SSD (started with the AIR) but the MAC OS is not optimized for SSD and does not support TRIM, plus it limits the data bandwidth allowed by the SSD. About 10% to 15% bandwidth is used up in HFS+ for maintenance (Journaling amongst others). If I measure the same SSD on my Mac hardware under Mac OS or Windows, the drive performs 10~15% better under Windows. My favorite is the C300 Crucial SSD. Does 330 Mb/s under Windows, stalls at 230 Mb/s under Mac OS. 
- RAID; Mac OS has a software RAID option that simply consolidates the drives found in the system. No performance gain here. A RAID controller in a MAC requires a MacPro with an empty PCI Express slot and is (again) limited to 553 MB/s data bandwidth. Plus it comes with a $ 600 price tag. Google any motherboard for Intel i7 or i5 processors and you'll find it very difficult to find one that does not have at least one Intel hardware RAID controller built-in and these are standard speed; 630 MB/s. 
- SATA 6Gb/s. Not supported by Apple, no time-frame for implementation and yet standard in mainstream PC boards. Such a shame. This SATA 3 revision was released in May 2009. 
- Software; while I also love the simplicity of the Mac OS, it has serious drawbacks when we are talking about computation power. A simple test was performed here http://www.kaycircle.com/Performance...ndows-7-64-bit
Same hardware, same software (in this case Photoshop CS5 64 bit) once running on Win7 64 bit and once on Mac 10.6. The performance dropped 10~20% under Mac OS. This is completely in line with my own experience.
These are all simple facts, add them together and it becomes very clear to me that Apple is no longer cutting-edge, no longer delivering the best performance, no longer shines as it used to. Ok so much for debate and I'm sorry that my remark about Apple hijacked this thread. 

Running a slave PC inside the MAC using VMWare Fusion is a brilliant idea! it requires some extra work and licenses but the result is great. And I was not amazed to see that loading patches is twice as fast as under native Mac OS._"

I am a Logic guy and therefore a Mac guy, but if Logic ran on a PC, I would be a Logic guy with a PC.


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## rgames (Feb 6, 2011)

I still don't understand why the Mac is so far behind - it's all hardware related and the Mac/PC use basically the same hardware nowadays. So it would seem Apple would have to *actively* cripple these features.

Things like Blu-Ray and Flash on the iPad are understandable: they require OS implementation and Apple has chosen to ignore them. But SSD performance is hardware related. Sure, software can have some effect, but it seems it would have to be really crappy software to be that bad. I don't know what HFS and journaling are so maybe that's it...

While Apple has never really led in computer performance, I get the sense that they consider themselves primarily a gadget company nowadays. So their focus on computer performance is greatly diminished. Maybe the focus will shift back to computers but the've marketed the other pieces of their business so heavily that I think it would be *really* hard to make the business case.

Also, the computer market has changed dramatically. 20 years ago, performance was more important because it was a market of performance-minded people. Those people still exist but are now vastly outnumbered by people who just want to browse the web. You can browse the web just fine on 10-year-old technology, so if that's your targeted demo, why bother providing better performance?

Apple clearly focuses on the image-conscious, net-savvy demo, and they can do just fine in that demo with older technology so long as it is heavily branded. So unless they expand their focus to include other demos it's not clear that they have any incentive to consider dektop computer performance.

rgames


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## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 6, 2011)

To be blunt, Jay, I think Michiel's interpretation of the facts is more than a little OTT and your having been smitten by it is sillier than you usually are.

Do we care about SATA 6Gb/s or USB 3? Journaling is a write-only *feature* that you can turn off. Photoshop is not a piece of music software. The Macs he mentions - iMacs, Mac Mini, and laptops - aren't the ones Apple sells for heavy-duty music software. The iMac is a completely gorgeous machine that actually can do a lot (my wife uses hers for Avid Express for example), but it's not designed for points on internet benchmark sites. Actually, even my 2007 MacBook Pro is powerful enough for a portable rig. But they sell Mac Pros for people who need the power.

What is interesting is the part about HFS+ and SSDs, which *could* confirm what I copied and pasted above if it applies to reading rather than writing. The difference between what people here reported with SSDs on Mac and TJ reported on Windows is much more than 15%, but it's still interesting.

Meanwhile my 2008 8 x 2.8GHz machine - from before USB 3 and the latest SATA crap that makes all your old drives out of date yet again - is still keeping up with everything.

Michiel is a sharp guy, and even you are, Jay, when you're not supporting the Celtics or political centrism. But the legitimate criticisms in what Michiel says are lost when you take them out of context.

All the Mac Pros to come out in the past three or four years - which used to be really old - have a crazy amount of power, and saying that Apple has lost its shine is just absurd.


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## midphase (Feb 6, 2011)

I agree with Nick....I was contemplating getting a new Mac Pro in December for tax purposes, and I just couldn't justify it since my old 4-core one has been doing just fine. Same is true with my laptop which I use primarily for internet and office use...I'd like me a shiny new Mac Book, but it would be for esthetic reasons only and not practical ones.


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## Ashermusic (Feb 7, 2011)

Nick and Kays, the simple fact is that I do not know anyone who has a powerful Mac and an equally powerful PC who is not seeing SSD performance and such significantly better on the PC.

The fact that you may already have machines that '"are keeping up with everything" and "doing just fine" goes out the window when you try to run Hollywood Strings as your primary string library and you can bet there will be more demanding libraries like it coming down the pike.

And how do you answer the fact that apparently even on the same Mac running it under Windows 7 improves the performance over running it in Snow Leopard?

As I say, I am a Logic guy and therefore must be committed to the Mac/OSX but given the option to run it on PC if I were in the market for a new machine, I would be very tempted to have one built for me.


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## jlb (Feb 7, 2011)

Well I am on a Mac Pro and the SSDs are screaming fast. (OCZ ones)

jlb


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## Ashermusic (Feb 7, 2011)

jlb @ Mon Feb 07 said:


> Well I am on a Mac Pro and the SSDs are screaming fast. (OCZ ones)
> 
> jlb



Are you running Hollywood Strings? What kind of voice count are you getting? How many instruments can you run?


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## jlb (Feb 7, 2011)

Hi Jay, no just LASS and a load of other stuff. Also using SSD as a boot drive.

jlb


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## Ashermusic (Feb 7, 2011)

jlb @ Mon Feb 07 said:


> Hi Jay, no just LASS and a load of other stuff. Also using SSD as a boot drive.
> 
> jlb



Yes, LASS ran just fine on my now lowly 2.66 Quad Core with 7200 drives, so it is not really a test for what we are talking about here, as it is nowhere near as demanding as H.S.


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## jlb (Feb 7, 2011)

Hi Jay, I saw that you sold your SSD as it made no difference to HS. That is interesting. I have logic itself installed on SSD, and my Kontakt 4 stuff on SSD, and it is great.

jlb


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## jlb (Feb 7, 2011)

[quote:15422d1e66="Ashermusic @ Mon Feb 07, 2011 3:55 pm"][quote:15422d1e66="jlb @ Mon Feb 07, 2011 7:24 am"]Hi Jay, no just LASS and a load of other stuff. Also using SSD as a boot drive.

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## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 7, 2011)

Jay, the whole reason I started this thread is to figure out why SSDs reportedly work better on Windows machines. My reaction is to the OTT stuff about how Macs are totally out of date.

It's worth pointing out that Hollywood Strings is the ultimate library in the brute force sampling approach - and I mean that in a good way, because it literally has everything covered from every angle (yes, it's a great library). But the price of all those samples is that it's also the most demanding library ever released, i.e. it's a unique case.

In other words, it's probably the exception proving the rule that recent computers are still ahead of the software - for the first time in digital history.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 7, 2011)

Jay, you could always build a hackintosh!

Actually, I wish my old XP machines could be turned into hackintoshes. I'd be tempted to try that with one or more of them.

In any case, you probably don't need the most expensive i7 chips to run Hollywood Strings on a Windows slave and get the benefit of better SSD performance. Host that in VE Pro and it feels no different from having it on the Mac running Logic.


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## SvK (Feb 7, 2011)

concerning processor speed requirements of HS...

HS does NOT tax the pc processor much at all....(if you are not using ve pro's audio ethernet stuff and instead just using VEpro as a host with an ADAT card and MOL)

the taxing is ALL in the streaming. you literally need a minimum of 3 SSD drives to be all right.
I have 2ssd's in a RAID 0 and another SSD non raid...
I am running "main mics" and am getting a very solid 500 voices.
When I look at my CPU hits they rarely if ever hit even 40%.
my processor is an I7 3,08Ghz quad w / 24gig RAM
A lesser processor with the above mentioned SSD config and RAM should rock.


PS: the reason the MAC blows @ HS is that ILok have NOT released a 64bit driver, so you can't get passed a 3.5gig RAM load with HS.


but really guys....Its never a good Idea to run the mamoth libs on the same machine as your DAW.....

best,
SvK

in conclusion to run HS you will need:

HS: 1500$
PC: 2700-3300$

total cost:

circa: 4800$

is it worth it........sure is. It sounds really, really great.

ASHER:
download a bench mark app(they are free) and tell us your reads for an SSD on MAC...all you do is hit a button and a couple seconds later it spits out your reads and writes. TYour SSD should read at circa 350 to 380.

SvK


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## SvK (Feb 7, 2011)

Ok guys here is a freeware MAC BenchTest ...it takes 10 seconds to post your results:

http://xbench.en.softonic.com/mac

run the app and uncheck everything but "Disk Test".

now choose which drive to test and then hit start.

Look for your read results.

best,
SvK


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## Ashermusic (Feb 7, 2011)

SvK, I no longer HAVE an SSD as I sold it to you, remember?


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## studioj (Feb 7, 2011)

SVK, are you running the Main Mics on the RAID 0 drives only? or do you split it up with the 3rd non-raid drive? how do you split it if so? whats the size of your drives? thx-


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## SvK (Feb 7, 2011)

studioJ

2 SSDs 128gig each that are "software raid 0" in SATA2 slots (read is 540):
BAsses, Celli, 2nd Violins, Violas


1 128gig SSD (read is 350)that is in proper SATA3 slot:
1st violins.

best,
SvK


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## Mike Connelly (Feb 9, 2011)

Ashermusic @ Mon Feb 07 said:


> Nick and Kays, the simple fact is that I do not know anyone who has a powerful Mac and an equally powerful PC who is not seeing SSD performance and such significantly better on the PC.



There's no question that SSD performance is much better on the PC side when you're using PLAY. There's also no question that SSD is much more finicky on the mac and there are a few SSD drives that are the best choices for mac users. But there have been people who have posted here that they have seen the expected improvements with SSD on mac using things like Kontakt, which leaves open the possibility that the issue may be PLAY performance on the two platforms more than SSD performance. No question that HS runs better on PC, but is it really because PCs run better than Mac or is it because PLAY is better optimized on Mac? (and is it really a case of being necessarily "demanding" or is it possible that the playback engine is just not that efficient?) PLAY isn't even 64 bit on Mac, which is a big limitation - who knows, when the 64 bit version finally ships it's possible that performance may catch up to the PC side.

MP makes some valid points. I'd love to see USB3 and especially SATA III on macs, as well as better SSD support in the OS (especially Trim). But I do think he goes over the top a bit, and as an employee of a developer that has to support both platforms there's no way to know if he's being impartial or just making excuses for software that doesn't support one platform as well as the other.

I'd be curious to see a performance comparison for Kontakt on both platforms (with and without SSD). While I haven't made a direct comparison, performance is absolutely blazing on my mac.



Ashermusic @ Mon Feb 07 said:


> I saw very little difference between the SSD and my WD 7200 drives with a 64 MB cache, certainly not enough to justify the cost.



Did you try any Kontakt libraries from that drive? It's possible the conclusions you drew were specific to the library and not the mac or the drive.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 9, 2011)

Mike, are you sure people have reported comparable performance on Macs with SSDs? I'm not doubting you, but I've been following these threads with interest and must have missed the posts you're talking about.

And that is an interesting question - whether it's just Play or across the board. It doesn't make intuitive sense that Play would see less of an improvement than Kontakt - you'd think that disk access is handled by the OS - but I suppose NI could have some trick way of storing their samples that's more efficient on SSDs.

BTW I honestly don't think Michiel is being partisan. It would be out of character from what I know of him.


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## Mike Connelly (Feb 9, 2011)

I haven't seen direct comparisons (it would be great if someone with both systems could do one) but there were posts of people seeing very large improvements in load times with Kontakt on mac/ssd. Some of those same users also tested out PLAY on the same hardware and saw absolutely no improvement from SSD.

Whether the speeds or improvement are as good as on the PC side I don't know but the improvement is still a big one and calls into question the notion of SSD having no improvement and it being the fault of the computer. If the bottleneck is the drive in all cases, then SSD should show improvement. But if the bottleneck is in the playback engine itself, a faster drive isn't going to make any difference because the software wouldn't even be asking for the data as fast as the drive can provide it. Whether that's the case or not I don't think anyone knows yet, but if one piece of software sees an improvement with a faster drive but another doesn't, that raises a red flag. It could also be something like one platform's preload buffers just happening to be a size that is more friendly to SSD.

JLB, what kind of data speeds are you seeing on your SSD when you load samples. PC guys with SSD, what speeds are you seeing during actual sample loading and playback?


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## jlb (Feb 9, 2011)

Mike Connelly @ Wed Feb 09 said:


> I haven't seen direct comparisons (it would be great if someone with both systems could do one) but there were posts of people seeing very large improvements in load times with Kontakt on mac/ssd. Some of those same users also tested out PLAY on the same hardware and saw absolutely no improvement from SSD.
> 
> Whether the speeds or improvement are as good as on the PC side I don't know but the improvement is still a big one and calls into question the notion of SSD having no improvement and it being the fault of the computer. If the bottleneck is the drive in all cases, then SSD should show improvement. But if the bottleneck is in the playback engine itself, a faster drive isn't going to make any difference because the software wouldn't even be asking for the data as fast as the drive can provide it. Whether that's the case or not I don't think anyone knows yet, but if one piece of software sees an improvement with a faster drive but another doesn't, that raises a red flag. It could also be something like one platform's preload buffers just happening to be a size that is more friendly to SSD.
> 
> JLB, what kind of data speeds are you seeing on your SSD when you load samples. PC guys with SSD, what speeds are you seeing during actual sample loading and playback?



Hi Mike, I haven't measured the actual load speed of samples but it is incredibly quick, light years ahead of anything I have seen before. My SSD is an OCZ I think it does about 285 mb/sec. We also tried loading that Lily Allen Logic demo song from SSD and it loaded in just a few seconds.

jlb


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## Ashermusic (Feb 9, 2011)

Personally, if I were to get SSDs it would not because I care about loading times, only if it would allow me to stream more Hollywood Strings instruments. An on the Mac, that does not seem to be the case.


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## SvK (Feb 9, 2011)

Jlb

285 for ssd is really slow...
It should read circa 350 minimum

SvK


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## SvK (Feb 9, 2011)

Then again that may be because it is residing in a SATA 2 slot rather than a SATA 3 slot...

Best,
SvK


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## jlb (Feb 10, 2011)

I dont really know how fast exactly, but it is a different world compared to HDD. Would NEVER go back to HD.

:D jlb


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## rgames (Feb 10, 2011)

jlb @ Thu Feb 10 said:


> 350? Mine are only supposed to do 285 read and write, I will have to measure what they are doing.
> 
> jlb



It does depend on file size but the drive should max out pretty quickly - the benchmarks I ran showed reads of 360 - 390 MB/s for file sizes larger than 64 kB. I doubt you're streaming samples smaller than 64 kB, so 380 MB/s should be pretty representative of what you can get. My HDD's maxed out at about 115 MB/s, so it was about a 3x read speed improvement.

I briefly looked at simultaneous streaming capabilty (that's what we really want to know, not single-file read speeds) by playing back a huge number of audio tracks. I was able to get about 4x the number of tracks on SSD vs. HDD but I don't know if that's the limit because Cubase crashed when I had a project with that many tracks. I can't remember the exact numbers but I think I was getting about 300 tracks from a HDD and 1200+ from a SSD, but Cubase became unstable when I had a project with 1200 audio tracks, so I'm not sure if it was a SSD limitation.

So, two different techniques gave numbers in the range of 3x - 4x over HDD. Given that HDD's do about 115 MB/s, the ~380 MB/s upper limit seems about right. One important difference, though, is that the HDD reaches its best speed on only part of the drive. So a 1 TB HDD might do 115 MB/s over only a couple hundred MB. The SSD maintains its speed over the entire drive, so if you want to consider an average read speed over the entire drive, the SSD advantage is probably more like 5x or 6x.

rgames


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## Mike Connelly (Feb 10, 2011)

JLB - in the Activity Monitor app there's a Disk Activity tab at the bottom that has "data read/sec" listed under it. Next time you load up a session that has lots of stuff loading from your SSD, could you fire up AM and take a look what kinds of speeds it shows for those SSD loads? Just curious how my system compares to yours.

If there's a similar way to do it on PC it would be great to get a comparison.


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## jlb (Feb 10, 2011)

Yes I will do that. I think we are forgeting that the big advantage isnt just transfer speed but absolutely no seek time. It gets to block 14 as quick as it gets to block 2463474578.

jlb


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## Mike Connelly (Feb 10, 2011)

rgames @ Thu Feb 10 said:


> It does depend on file size but the drive should max out pretty quickly - the benchmarks I ran showed reads of 360 - 390 MB/s for file sizes larger than 64 kB. I doubt you're streaming samples smaller than 64 kB, so 380 MB/s should be pretty representative of what you can get. My HDD's maxed out at about 115 MB/s, so it was about a 3x read speed improvement.
> 
> I briefly looked at simultaneous streaming capabilty (that's what we really want to know, not single-file read speeds) by playing back a huge number of audio tracks. I was able to get about 4x the number of tracks on SSD vs. HDD but I don't know if that's the limit because Cubase crashed when I had a project with that many tracks. I can't remember the exact numbers but I think I was getting about 300 tracks from a HDD and 1200+ from a SSD, but Cubase became unstable when I had a project with 1200 audio tracks, so I'm not sure if it was a SSD limitation.
> 
> ...



The samples aren't going to be smaller than 64k, but when you're streaming many tracks the drive is going to be getting many relatively small chunks from many different places on the drive. 360-390 would be a benchmark number for a sequential read but I assume streaming samples would fall somewhere between sequential and a random read which is a much lower number. 

Do you have a way to see the data rate coming off the drive during regular use? I'd be curious what it is on your system, but I'd be very surprised if playing back a session (or probably even loading samples) got anywhere close to 360.

The comparison of number of tracks makes sense, but I wonder if the improvement is more from having better total data throughput or from having lower seek times and better random reads.

What model of SSD do you have, and is it multiple drives or just one?


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## rgames (Feb 10, 2011)

Yes - should be somewhere between sequential and random. I think the seek time is why the benchmark with multiple tracks did better than the sequential read benchmark - if you do the math, 300 stereo tracks is only about 54 MB/s (I was using 16 bit / 44.1 kHz files). So the HDD was maxing out well below its max sequential read speed, probably because it was having a hard time w/ the seek requirements. Because the seek time for the SSD is (at least) an order of magnitude better than the HDD, it was showing much better performance in that benchmark. Again, it crapped out around 1200 tracks but I don't think it was a drive limitation - I think it could have done better if Cubase could have handled it.

I have a single drive - the C300 running through a SATA 6 Gbps card under Win 7. I think Windows has a drive speed readout but I'm using the drive for my system drive now so I can't run a meaningful benchmark anymore. Plus, I'm always a little leery of Windows' measurements - I don't think they're very accurate.

rgames


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## SvK (Feb 10, 2011)

"I have the C300 running through a SATA 6 Gbps card under Win 7"


m2...thats what i have.....the KEY is the 6Gbps card that allows for our 350++ reads right?

SvK


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## Mike Connelly (Feb 10, 2011)

But are you actually getting those 350+ reads in real world use (whether that's loading or playback streaming)? The 350 number is from a benchmark, and we've yet to see if anyone is even coming close to that number during any audio use.

Is there any utility on Windows that shows the speed of the data coming off at any given time? If not I suppose the other way to measure it would be to time how long it takes to load a given instrument of a given size.


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## SvK (Feb 10, 2011)

mike

my machine is running a solid 500 voices....thats all i know.

Thats my real world test.


SvK


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## rgames (Feb 10, 2011)

Yes - the voice count is the ultimate metric. You can get some idea of read speed from load times but that's a bit more complicated because there's some additional overhead there that doesn't show up when you're streaming.

I did a streaming test using VE Pro but gave up on it for some reason - can't recall why. I'd say the best benchmark right now is the streaming voices indicator in PLAY.

It's true the other benchmark is synthetic. However, though it might not give you the absolute measure of streaming, it should give you some indication of relative performance as compared to a HDD. Just like the SSD isn't getting 350+ during real-world use, the HDD isn't getting 100+ in real-world use. So you can still compare them because the real-world performance of both is diminished. How much? Hard to say.

One thing is certain though, we care about two basic elements of disk performance: read speed and seek time. It's hard to imagine that the SSD read speed would fall more ò u   ß•Ú u   ß– u   ß– u   ß–] u   ß—# u   ß—A u   ß˜4 u   ß˜9 u   ß˜L u   ß˜e u   ß˜ä u   ß™ u   ßŸ’ u   ßŸ» u   ßŸô u   ß & u   ß — u   ß ° u   ß¦˜ u   ß¦¥ u   ß¦ý u   ß§H u   ß§y u   ß§ u   ßªM u   ßª¢ u   ß­  u   ß­ë u   ß®W u   ß®‰ u   ß°( u   ß°3 u   ß°7 u   ß°f u   ß²T u   ß²c u   ß²f u   ß¸ø u   ß½õ u   ß¾£ u   ß¿
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## Ashermusic (Feb 10, 2011)

SvK @ Thu Feb 10 said:


> mike
> 
> my machine is running a solid 500 voices....thats all i know.
> 
> ...



Exactly.


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## Mike Connelly (Feb 10, 2011)

It's useful to you to know that your machine can get 500 voices when it couldn't before with HD...but that's not a metric that can be used to compare SSD performance on mac versus PC. Which is what this topic was initially about. It also doesn't help figure out what the bottlenecks may be or how to work around them (things like whether SATA II versus III is even a factor), which is what I'm trying to figure out.



rgames @ Thu Feb 10 said:


> I seem to recall a thread a while back where someone was getting 1200 voices or so via PLAY. Thats' the equivalent of 324 MB/s, so a bit lower than the benchmarks, but in the ballpark.



Assuming that was one of the tests that was tons of polyphony on one patch, I don't think the math works that way. There's some preload buffer and if all the voices are the same instrument much of the sample data will be redundant and may be cached by either the disk cache or in ram. I've done polyphony tests like that and seen extremely high polyphony with little or no data coming off the disk. A test like that is primarily testing CPU and what kind of polyphony the playback engine itself can handle.


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## jlb (Feb 10, 2011)

Whatever performance you PC guys are getting I am sticking with Mac! I am more than happy with the SSD performance, and I just don't need the inevitable grief from a PC. I dont ever want to be worrying again about viruses, malware and the blue screen of death, Ive seen far too much of all that, enought to last a lifetime :roll: 

Interesting thread though

jlb


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## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 10, 2011)

Actually, Mike, I think voice count (with matching buffer sizes, the same audio interface, and instruments loaded) is THE metric to compare SSD performance on Mac and PC. And I agree that you'd want to load lots of different instruments rather than the same one over and over.

SvK, are those mono or stereo voices?


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## SvK (Feb 10, 2011)

Stereo its hs


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## Mike Connelly (Feb 10, 2011)

I think it does have the potential to be the best metric for what we're doing, but as you point out, all the variables have to be matched up to get a real comparison between hardware configurations. I'd say that not only would you want the same instruments loaded, you'd want to play back the same sequence on each since voice count can depend on whether you're triggering different samples or the same ones repeatedly (which may be cached instead of coming from disk).

It would be interesting to try a voice count comparison, if there are people interested who have SSD and the same libraries (I'd suggest ones on Kontakt).


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## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 10, 2011)

So SvK you're getting 1000 voices. That's like awesome.

Expensive but like totally awesome.


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## rgames (Feb 10, 2011)

Caching/buffers/etc definitely have an effect that is hard to account for. So does voice stealing. I recall now that's why I gave up on the test using VE Pro - I had so many voices going that I couldn't tell if existing voices were being stopped when new ones were added.

Those problems should be avoided using the audio track test because you can use tracks long enough to make sure you're not playing back from the buffer in RAM, so it must come from the disk. However, when I ran it it was (obviously) impossible to tell if all 1200 tracks were actually playing. Sure, the project chugs along and you see the cursor move along the timeline, but do you have ears good enough to tell if one is not playing? I certainly don't.

So that's the advantage of the benchmark: at least there's no uncertainty about what you're actually measuring.

I found the old thread: http://www.vi-control.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18571.

It was 750 - 800 stereo voices in PLAY (1500 - 1600 total voices), not 1200 stereo voices. There's another post down a ways that says 1200 voices using Kontakt. Again, though, it's uncertain how they relate because of buffers/cache/voice stealing/etc.

rgames


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## Mike Connelly (Feb 28, 2011)

Yeah, the test in that old thread isn't remotely close to real world use since it's high polyphony but hammering just one patch. It's grabbing the same data repeatedly instead of having to handle that same polyphony coming from many different instruments.

No question that controlled benchmarks are the best way to actually measure performance, problem is that it's very hard to create good benchmarking techniques for things like audio sample streaming.

High voice count is great but it doesn't tell us much about things like SATA 2 versus 3 - specifically the reasons WHY one setup may handle a given instrument better than another setup.


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