Re: MacBook Pro Processing Bandwidth Reality Check
Just beware in Mac OSX TRIM is only supported on Apple SSD's without tweaking. Hopefully you bought your SSD from a Mac retailer that sold you an SSD based on SandForce controllers that does garbage collection without the need for TRIM. If not, as soon as you have written enough bytes equal to the capacity of your drive you are going to hit a performance wall on writes that will make you wish you had your old hard drive back.
This is due to the way flash memory works and the fact that before a cell can be written to, it has to be erased. Flash memory cells are quite large compared to individual bits on a traditional hard drive so if the cell isn't completely empty before data needs to be written to it the entire cell has to be read and buffered, the cell erased, then the old data written back along with the new data.
That's why you hear the term garbage collection and where either TRIM or over-provisioning come into play. With TRIM the OS tells the drive what data is good or not, and the drive shuffles bits in the background to always ensure there are at least a few completely empty flash cells standing by for maximum performance. With the SandForce based SSD's, they have extra capacity and shuffle bits without regard to whether the data is "good" or not using the extra capacity to always ensure there are completely empty flash memory cells available for writing.
Given this dynamic of SSD's and even with TRIM or other garbage collection, for recording audio I would still highly recommend a firewire external drive of the traditional magnetic spinning disk variety. Firewire over USB because Firewire is not near as CPU dependent (it can work independent of the CPU) and it has much lower latency; both things that will help you dramatically when recording audio.
SSD's are great for many things, but I wouldn't recommend them for recording audio to. They are definitely not a drop in replacement for traditional hard drives in all circumstances.
Just beware in Mac OSX TRIM is only supported on Apple SSD's without tweaking. Hopefully you bought your SSD from a Mac retailer that sold you an SSD based on SandForce controllers that does garbage collection without the need for TRIM. If not, as soon as you have written enough bytes equal to the capacity of your drive you are going to hit a performance wall on writes that will make you wish you had your old hard drive back.
This is due to the way flash memory works and the fact that before a cell can be written to, it has to be erased. Flash memory cells are quite large compared to individual bits on a traditional hard drive so if the cell isn't completely empty before data needs to be written to it the entire cell has to be read and buffered, the cell erased, then the old data written back along with the new data.
That's why you hear the term garbage collection and where either TRIM or over-provisioning come into play. With TRIM the OS tells the drive what data is good or not, and the drive shuffles bits in the background to always ensure there are at least a few completely empty flash cells standing by for maximum performance. With the SandForce based SSD's, they have extra capacity and shuffle bits without regard to whether the data is "good" or not using the extra capacity to always ensure there are completely empty flash memory cells available for writing.
Given this dynamic of SSD's and even with TRIM or other garbage collection, for recording audio I would still highly recommend a firewire external drive of the traditional magnetic spinning disk variety. Firewire over USB because Firewire is not near as CPU dependent (it can work independent of the CPU) and it has much lower latency; both things that will help you dramatically when recording audio.
SSD's are great for many things, but I wouldn't recommend them for recording audio to. They are definitely not a drop in replacement for traditional hard drives in all circumstances.
