johnstump_organist wrote:Will I see real improvement? I read some earlier posts (2012/13) that seem to suggest a 25-30% improvement in time. I'm not sure I would consider that worth the cost. I was hoping for at least half the time.
Hello John,
I just loaded a couple of organs in the current version of Hauptwerk (v4.2.1) with all default rank options on a 2011 MacBook Pro with 512 GB Apple SSD, booted into Windows 8.1 (for some reason OS X is running very slowly for me today -- perhaps it's updating something, or perhaps my SSD partition is too full) to give you a very, very rough idea of typical performance from a (2011) SSD. These are the relevant excerpts from the log:
2015-09-21-13-04-38: INF:4165 Welcome to Hauptwerk.
Hauptwerk version: 4.2.1.003.
...
CPU speed: 2494 MHz.
CPU/computer type: GenuineIntel: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2860QM CPU @ 2.50GHz, Intel64 Family 6 Model 42 Stepping 7.
...
2015-09-21-13-05-39: INF:2157 The organ StAnnesMoseley.Organ_Hauptwerk_xml has been loaded. Metrics:
...
Total time: overall: 8.847 sec.
Total time: sample data: 7.615 sec.
...
Sample loader: approx. avg. overall data read rate: 174.72 MB/s.
Sample loader: approx. avg. data read rate during disk reader activity: 196.02 MB/s.
...
2015-09-21-13-04-56: INF:2157 The organ Bovenkerk-Hinsz-Volume-I.Organ_Hauptwerk_hbx has been loaded. Metrics:
...
Organ ID: 000131.
Organ ver.: 1.02.
...
Total time: overall: 13.871 sec.
Total time: sample data: 12.796 sec.
...
Sample loader: approx. avg. overall data read rate: 178.43 MB/s.
Sample loader: approx. avg. data read rate during disk reader activity: 179.99 MB/s.
As you can see there from the 'read rate' figures, my SSD manages about 180-200 MB/s, and my CPU is the bottleneck, limiting actual Hauptwerk loading performance to about 170-180 MB/s.
Assuming that your candidate SSD would perform at least as well (being newer, although not Apple-branded) you could compare those figures to the values that you currently get after rebooting your Mac (to make sure that OS X hasn't cached any of the drive data in RAM from a previous load) and then loading a few sample sets and using '
Help | View activity log' to see the read-rate figures.
(I usually get very slightly faster loading under OS X than Windows on this Mac, but not today for some reason!)
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.