OCZ RevoDrive: Any advantage for DAW use?

[Cableaddict]

I need to change my Reaper DAW's boot drive. Currently using an Intel 80 GB SSD, which works great, but I need more capacity.

I'm considering on of OCZ's Revodrives. (connects via PCIe)

They are only slightly more expensive per gig as Sata-II SSD's, but more than 2X as fast. They seem to have about the same percentage of failures, so why not?

-except I would likely lose the ability to use my software raid. There have also been a few reported cases of incompatibility with other PCIe devices. Who needs the headache?

OK, a decent hardware raid system isn't horribly expensive, and theoretically that even takes some strain off the cpu, but it's still $$$. So I'm wondering:
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Would I even see any benefit from all that speed, on a boot drive? Booting in 40 seconds instead of 50 seconds is no big deal. I want to know if there would be any posible PERFORMANCE boost, anywhere at all.

### For instance, would it possibly let me drop my audio card down to a faster HW buffer?
- or is that dependent primarily on the card & driver? At 44.1K and a 64 HW buffer, my 980X rig is only running at about 15% total cpu,and I can "sort of" use a 32 buffer. Yet, @ 88.2K I can't run with a 128 buffer. A 256 buffer BARELY gets me by. So, it seems that my audio driver / buffer is the true bottleneck in my system. (but do they depend on read-write operations to function?)

Perhaps a super-fast boot drive would let the audio driver / buffer "do it's thing" faster, and so not bog down when I try to run at 88.2K, and my cpu usage goes up to around 50%?

Has anyone even successfully used one of these together with a PCIe audio card?

[Cableaddict]

Bump.

Hoping someone has this info, as I must make a decision today.

[EvilDragon]

Originally Posted by Cableaddict

### For instance, would it possibly let me drop my audio card down to a faster HW buffer?
- or is that dependent primarily on the card & driver? At 44.1K and a 64 HW buffer, my 980X rig is only running at about 15% total cpu,and I can "sort of" use a 32 buffer. Yet, @ 88.2K I can't run with a 128 buffer. A 256 buffer BARELY gets me by. So, it seems that my audio driver / buffer is the true bottleneck in my system. (but do they depend on read-write operations to function?)

Hard drive speed isn't gonna help you much there. It's all about the drivers and CPU.

[shoyoninja]

SSD wont help.

Which motherboard are you currently using?

[Cableaddict]

^ Kind of what I thought, but wanted to check. (looking for excuse to try the otherwise useless RevoDrive)


Using an Asus Rampage II Gene, with a 908X. SSD boot drive. Win7 - 64.

[ivansc]

Purely as an aside, my boot drive is a SATA3 7200 with a big cache.
AMD 6 core processor.
Win7 Pro64 boots in under 30 seconds.
And yet with a SSD you are over 40 seconds. Interesting & I am glad I didnt spend the money yet.
I know there are a lot of other factors involved, but speeding up hard drive access would seem like a red herring in your case.

[shoyoninja]

There must be something you can do to improve the results, such as disabling uneeded devices. I guess you already turned off all cpu/gpu power saving features.

Im getting a slightly better performance than this on a old core 2 duo e7500 + Asus Commando motherboard. You got plenty more power than I do, so its just being spent somewhere else.

Still, considering the boot time you just related and that you are already using a ssd, I think you got a good ammount of stuff being loaded on the system. To be able to use the hardware on such low latency this isnt good, and you will loose performance.

Im using Windows 7 too, and the boot up is well under 30s. I use a 7200 rpm 320gb hd for the system drive.

How much latency does DPC Latency Checker report?

[Cableaddict]

Yes, I have several diagnostic apps that load automatically. this is my preference. I'm not worried about boot speed.

My DPC latency is so low it's ridiculous. (my system & bios are well-stripped.)

Again, I'm just wondering is a super-fast boot drive could have some benefit to the system / apps as a whole.

[ivansc]

As far as I can see from what you have posted, the only difference an even faster BOOT drive would give you is a decrease in loading times when you actually run an app.
Once the applications in memory, there is no further advantage to be had, unless you are running something that needs to access libraries or other ancillary files regularly once the app is invoked.

Now if this were to be used as a recording drive or somewhere to store your samples, yes I can see the point in doing it.

[Cableaddict]

What about the heap file? That's probably not a bottleneck, esp if shared by several drives, but you never know.

Any other invisible files that get written when an app runs?

- And how exactly does the hardware buffer work? Is that all done in ram? (probably, but I'm just checking.)