VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[Mike Harrison]

Analyzing again. Excluding the cloud, is there anything that says one type of external drive (HDD vs SSD) is better for working with and storing audio files? (Anything, beyond a marketing angle, that is.)

Next question, if you use external SSDs, is there any reason to eject (unmount) them before putting a computer to sleep? When using mechanical external drives, I was in the habit of ejecting them before sleeping the computer just to keep them from spinning unnecessarily during the night. With the SSDs, I'm wondering whether ejecting them and letting them cool every night might prolong their life a bit.
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Mike
Male Voice Over Talent
I have taken leave of my sensors.

[Lee Gordon]

Since nothing spins in an SSD, there's no reason to take any special steps to protect them from wear and tear.
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Lee Gordon, O.A.V.
Voice President of the United States
www.leegordonproductions.com
Twitter: @LeeGordonVoice

[todd ellis]

There is a theory that SSDs only have "so many" read-write cycles in them before they fail. However, I haven't been able to find ... anywhere, what that number might be. Spinny drives are plenty fast for audio and much cheaper per GB. I use Samsung 870 QVO 2tb SSDs ($140) for editing video and they are super-fast and I haven't had a failure in 2 years (knock wood). Like Lee said, since nothing moves, they do not get hot at all. They just sit there and work.
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"i know philip banks": todd ellis
who's/on/1st?

[Mike Paul]

For working with audio files, SSD is the way to go. Reason: read/writes are much faster since there are no moving parts as others have mentioned. Good comparison here https://www.avast.com/c-ssd-vs-hdd# "HDDs can copy 30 to 150 MB per second (MB/s), while standard SSDs perform the same action at speeds of 500 MB/s. Newer NVME SSDs can even show speeds of up to an astounding 3,000 to 3,500 MB/s. With an SSD, you can copy a 20 GB movie in less than 10 seconds, while a hard disk would take at least two minutes."

Since you'll want speed for editing but don't care about that for storage, go for an SSD in your computer, and HDD for your long-term storage. Store more for less money. If you want to to go full-on geekasauras rex, get yourself a Drobo. When a drive fails, it's lit up red and you just replace it. All other drives in this multi-disc array continue functioning and your data/backups are preserved.

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No reason to eject or unmount an SSD, whether internal or external, before putting computer to sleep. This is a very old habit you can safely break. Switching to SSD for daily operations has changed the game significantly from a spinning disk HDD. If money were no object, I'd get the fastest SSD I could for my computer, and an HDD array for long-term storage, using a Drobo.

[Mike Harrison]

Thanks, guys! Enjoy the holidays!
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Mike
Male Voice Over Talent
I have taken leave of my sensors.