Refills and Scratch Disks advice

[MrFigg]

Hi. Last night my PC died and I couldn’t revive it. Ach well...I was really needing to upgrade my cpu anyway. I’ve now got two SSD and two HD’s spare and am buying a third SSD. My question (actually two questions) are:-

1. With Reason and OS on my primary SSD will I get any benefit from storing refills on a secondary SSD or is it better to have them on the same SSD as Reason?

2. Will I get better performance using a secondary SSD as the scratch disk?

Thanks in advance for any help with this .

[platzangst]

It is my understanding (I could be wrong, your mileage may vary, etc.) that the leading cause of SSD failure is repeated re-writing of data - such as the kind of re-writing that goes on in applications that require large scratch disk spaces. Like Reason, or just about any other high-quality audio recording software for that matter. I personally have my OS and apps installed on SSD drives, while I keep high-volume data such as Refills and work files on a separate conventional pair of hard drives (all this is arranged in some way via a RAID setup that basically leaves me with two virtual drives, C: being the SSDs and D: being the regular HDs).

I can't say whether you'd have better performance, per se, by doing it that way, but I do it like that to avoid excessive use of my main OS drives.

[MrFigg]

It is my understanding (I could be wrong, your mileage may vary, etc.) that the leading cause of SSD failure is repeated re-writing of data - such as the kind of re-writing that goes on in applications that require large scratch disk spaces. Like Reason, or just about any other high-quality audio recording software for that matter. I personally have my OS and apps installed on SSD drives, while I keep high-volume data such as Refills and work files on a separate conventional pair of hard drives (all this is arranged in some way via a RAID setup that basically leaves me with two virtual drives, C: being the SSDs and D: being the regular HDs).

I can't say whether you'd have better performance, per se, by doing it that way, but I do it like that to avoid excessive use of my main OS drives.

Thanks for answering. I’m not really worried about the SSDs failing due to excessive writing as I have been led to understand that this is seldom a problem. I was more wondering if having the scratch disk on a secondary SSD has any impact on performance. The same with accessing refills in terms of speed. Faster if Reason is running on one drive and the refills are being accessed in another. I guess the actual difference in performance would not really be noticeable if the machine is up to spec but would still like to have the optimal setup running. Storage space is not an issue and I have everything backed up elsewhere but if slapping an 80gb SSD in to use as the scratch disk would be more effective for running the program I’d do it. But if not then it just feels unnecessary. I’ll try and read up on the subject. Thanks again for writing. Appreciated .

[platzangst]

Storage space is not an issue and I have everything backed up elsewhere but if slapping an 80gb SSD in to use as the scratch disk would be more effective for running the program I’d do it. But if not then it just feels unnecessary. I’ll try and read up on the subject. Thanks again for writing. Appreciated .

Well, again, as I understand it (and things might have changed somewhere in the last few Reason versions), the scratch disk is used mostly for audio track recording/playback. I see the biggest scratch files when I've had sessions that use audio tracks as opposed to tracks that stick to the virtual instruments. And it may have changed now that there's VST support, but as I heard it one of the problems in getting that VST support was that Reason uses RAM for things like samplers - it had to load instrument samples into RAM, and would not read that from disk.

If all that remains true, then any performance improvement for having a scratch disk on a separate drive would be mostly in cases where you were doing a lot of audio recording and playback, assuming that having the scratch data flowing in and out of a separate drive than your OS and Reason itself would be more efficient (which it may or may not be, depending on your system).

[MrFigg]

Storage space is not an issue and I have everything backed up elsewhere but if slapping an 80gb SSD in to use as the scratch disk would be more effective for running the program I’d do it. But if not then it just feels unnecessary. I’ll try and read up on the subject. Thanks again for writing. Appreciated .

Well, again, as I understand it (and things might have changed somewhere in the last few Reason versions), the scratch disk is used mostly for audio track recording/playback. I see the biggest scratch files when I've had sessions that use audio tracks as opposed to tracks that stick to the virtual instruments. And it may have changed now that there's VST support, but as I heard it one of the problems in getting that VST support was that Reason uses RAM for things like samplers - it had to load instrument samples into RAM, and would not read that from disk.

If all that remains true, then any performance improvement for having a scratch disk on a separate drive would be mostly in cases where you were doing a lot of audio recording and playback, assuming that having the scratch data flowing in and out of a separate drive than your OS and Reason itself would be more efficient (which it may or may not be, depending on your system).

That’s exactly what I was thinking. Back before SSDs were so widespread, when I was doing a lot of audio recording, I read that it was good to have one HDD for running Reason and another for recording/ playing back the audio so I guess that’s still true (probably). That said, with a high performance machine the difference is perhaps negligible. Thanks