SSDs are slower on write than read, and early SSDs were not much faster than HDs, but almost any new SSD you buy now is much faster than HD, typically 200-500MB/s write speed.
SSD might be a bit expensive for keeping all your multitrack audio projects because their storage capacity cost is high, but that’s a different problem.
Having said that, you can record a lot of simultaneous tracks to HD without running into problems - it’s not usually a bottleneck in a properly set up system. I’ve done 8 at a time, and I’m sure others have done more.
That leads me to a question I am thinking about for some time:
I plan to rip out the hard disks out of my system and put them into a NAS. I only want an SSD to remain in my desktop box. As anahata said, it’s not possible to keep all my audio projects on the SSDs. That is not a big problem as I only need the project(s) I am currently working on to be on the local SSD.
But what’s the best way to do that? Do I just copy the project directories or maybe put them into a tarball on the NAS? Has anyone used git or svn for that? How do git and svn handle audio files?
hopefully this has been sorted out in IRC… there are lot of configuration related messages in there… I’m surprised that these configuration issues exist on an audio distro… (maybe try using AVlinux instead there are a lot of users of that distro here… and GMaq is on these forums alot. )
With regards to CPU’s … any current CPU will require a new hard drive - they now have 1155 pins not 1156,
An SSD drive for your audio projects may help more than a better CPU (while yours has been superceded is still reasonably powerful)…
ON a mechanical drive, things like your disk partitioning, disk fragmentation and the physical location of the files on the drive may seriously impact your work…
as for graphics cards - I use a very low end nvidia - simply so it has dedicated RAM and offloads the dual screen rendering… very low end is also better for audio as there are many fanless options… I’m not sure how necessary a dedicated GPU is these days for audio…
I use a core i7 … but I disable hyperthreading… as Ardour 3 beta sees the hyperthreading as additional cores… (it see my core i7 as being 8 core) … and I don’t know if Paul and the team have coded Ardour to be hyperthreading aware or whether it sees all 8 cores as equal. . (e.g. a virtual/hypertrheaded core has less resources than a true core)… so an i5 CPU is probably money better spent…