[Ardour-Users] Audio drive - file system?

[Joe Hartley]

On Tue, 21 Aug 2012 16:23:05 +0100
John Rigg <au2 at jrigg.co.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 09:27:20AM -0400, Joe Hartley wrote:
> > On Tue, 21 Aug 2012 09:06:46 +0100 John Rigg wrote:
> > > Good points, but beware of the SSD's habit of losing data when left
> > > unpowered for any length of time. The modern ones are much worse for this
> > > than the earlier ones. SSDs are great for work in progress, but useless
> > > for long term storage.
 . . .
> My understanding is that the SSD's ability to retain data decreases
> with the number of writes, and that number gets smaller as the memory
> cell geometry gets smaller:
> 
> http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm

That's *VERY* different than "losing data when left unpowered".  It's
a known problem that lots of writes can wear out cells on SSDs, but that
too is improving on the latest high-end drives.  Less so than on the
cheaper consumer level drives, but that will catch up as well.

I find that my /tape drive (a mirrored SSD pair used for my audio sessions)
is pretty static.  I'll add sessions and tracks within sessions, but I
don't do much overwriting, which leads to the cell fatigue.  I am sure at
some point I'll remove some sessions to make room, but I haven't had to
yet.  Without lots of overwrites, the SSDs should be fine for a long time
to come.

> I have a couple of SSDs in my main DAW as they are fast and silent, but
> I'm very careful to back up to conventional HDDs as soon as possible.
> I'm willing to be convinced that this is over-cautious if anyone has
> some hard numbers on this.

I back up the SSDs to spinning disk nightly with a cron job that runs
rsync.  There's no such thing as over-cautious when it comes to backups!

-- 
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       Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh at brainiac.com
 Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa