Woah! just stopped myself buying an SSD - thankfully

I’m getting ready to go Prime and decided that a new hard drive was a good idea. After all, there’s no point in spending thousands on top of the range gear, then thinking that a hard drive that cost me 50 quid, two hard years ago is gonna be “ok”.

As the blind buzzword at the moment seems to be SSD (solid state drive) I had a look at those and read up on google, firstly for hints of which makes or models to go for. But apparently, they’re not recommended for large media collections.

Also, it seems that if you fill them to over 75% capacity they can give worse performance than spinning motor hard drives. This was a concern for me as I was going to put 900GB onto a 1TB SSD drive, which immediately put me over the 75% capacity, and into the slower than a motor hard drive zone. The solution would be to buy a 2TB SSD to put my 900GB of music onto, but the 2TB SSDs are giddy bonkers prices.

Here’s one of the main articles which I came across.

A few things. The article you reference is from 2013. In SSD country, new stuff happens fast. The 75% “rule” is becoming less relevant and many OS will automatically leave a blank space at the end of the drive for just that purpose if deemed necessary. Controllers and chips improve at a high rate. The only thing SSDs really don’t do too well is lots of (re)writes. But if you put music on it, that is a write once/read many activity. Should not be a problem for modern day SSDs.

I’ll agree that while prices have gone down a lot, they are still not cheap once you cross the 500GB/1TB mark.

I do wonder what you need to carry 900GB of music for though. Being a mobile DJ myself I know all about the desire/need to have a large collection of request music, but that is like 90.000 tracks in 320MP3! Currently I have a core collection that fits on any device (USB-stick, iPad/iPhone memory, iPod, SSD) which contains about 1.000 high quality, fully prepped (beatgrid, cue points, loops) tracks. The rest sits on a regular HDD. Just basic tagging, no cue points, no beatgrids. Purely for request use. I have about half the number you mention and I know for a fact that more than 60% of those tracks haven’t gotten played in the last 10 years :stuck_out_tongue:.

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