Peace and Harmony to all,

Does anyone in the group have experience using Biab (and/or ancillary DAW software) with solid state drives (SSD)in their setup?

Of particular interest are multiple-drive systems (whether incorporating SSD or all HDD's) and successful strategies used to relocate Biab (or any other DAW software) files to different drives.

If you are doing somthing like this I'd appreciate a synopsis of your experience.

SSD's are incredibly fast. The real advantage is in seek time. Old platter drives (HDD) have typical real world seek times of 12-18 ms while solid state drives deliver .08 ms to .20 ms (yeah, that's **point oh eight ms**). Read speeds are phenomenal and, depending on your operating system controllers, range from ~100Mb/s to over 250MB/s.

Whoa! Could you use that kind of speed throughout your entire DAW? Yeah, but there are caveats.

SSD weaknesses are relatively slower re-write speeds (due to their architecture), a limited write cycle lifespan of around 10,000 writes per memory cell, and higher cost per GB and, currently, lower drive capacity. 30GB solid state costs around ~$100. A hundred dollars right now can buy a 1TB HDD (or 1000MB)or more of platter disk drives.

To best utilize SSD strengths and avoid their weaknesses my strategy is a hybrid SSD/HDD system: Store the operating systems and essential programs that don't change a lot on an SSD and distribute the data files -- the files that are either very large or are frequently re-written -- among the 'old tech' HDD platter drives.

Maybe another SSD for reading essential audio sample files (that aren't re-written)? Comments and suggestions welcome on this point.

Buying a thousand GB's of solid state is still too expensive for my taste right now, but adding 60-80GB under $200 for the core systems looks good. Even 30GB at ~$100 is enough for the core OS and some essential programs.

Windows ( XP I'm using) writes a bunch of little files and I know how to move those to the platter drives. Biab (and other audio programs) write a bunch of little files, too, and I'd like to hear from anyone with experience or knowledge on moving these files to the platter drives.

Thanks
Lawrence