Digital DJing Laptop & Solid State Drives

My old 13" Black Macbook (Late 2006 - C2D 2.0gHz, 2GB) is starting to show it's wear and age. I used to have Macbook Pro's (and a PowerBook back in the Power-PC days)... but money at the time when I had to buy a new laptop was short, so I settled for this Macbook... but this replacement I want to upgrade back to a 13" Macbook Pro. Rumour has it that new Macbook Pros are arriving March 1st. I will wait to see the specs of the new Macbook Pros... but if they haven't changed much on the 13" models... I have a plan. I would buy a refurbished Macbook Pro (refurbished models have same 1 year warranty, but with a nice price drop)... but than I would upgrade the HDD to a 256GB SSD (about $500 to do the upgrade).

I've seen plenty of videos showing some amazing performance differences between SSD and the standard HDD's in Macbook Pros. Just wondering if anyone who uses Traktor (or any other digital dj software) and has their laptop upgraded with a SSD. Just wondering if I'd see much advantage, or any issues, with using a SSD and Traktor.

Thanks.

I have an SSD in my 2009 unibody macbook, and I don't regret it, but not just for speed reasons, to be honest. Yes, the performance jump is very noticable on boot and when starting up programs. Even track loading in Traktor is faster. But let's be honest, it changed from fast enough to faster, which is nice, but in my opinion not yet worth the money.
For me, the main reason to use a SSD drive is the fact that they're a lot more resistant to vibrations. I've DJed in a few places where the booth or stage suffered from severe vibrations that came from the PA. You know, the kind of vibration that would make using turntables nearly impossible. In situations like that, I am pretty sure that a regular HD might be damaged or at least the sudden motion sensor triggered.

Black late-08 Macbook (2.16, 2gb) with an older, cheap Kensington SSD. It's a god send.

I can boot up, start traktor, finish the consistency check, and be ready to play inside 10 or 15 seconds. It's worth only having 64GB of space (didn't have money for more).

One thing you do need to know is that SSDs still have some issues related to small-file write speed degrading over time. It doesn't seem to be a huge deal for playing, but it's screwed up some recordings for me in the past. The short-term solution is a freespace wipe (overwrite with 0s in Disk Utility is fine), though that's just a bandaid. Expect to do a full wipe, reinstall, restore from backup about once a year or so, and you'll be fine. Or just record to an external if it's in really bad shape.

If you keep a clone of the OS X install disk on an external hard drive instead of using the physical DVD then it doesn't take more than a few hours to do the whole thing. Just keep a clone image of the DVD on a separate partition on your backup drive…you can boot off it and an intelligent install (ignoring useless language packs and printer drivers) takes like 20 minutes. Restoring my drive from Time Machine takes less than an hour. The longest part is over-writing the disk with zeros, which you can do from Disk Utility after booting the image of the OS X install disk you keep on your backup drive. If your SSD comes with a utility to do a low-level format…it probably works better, but I haven't had problems with just overwriting with zeros.

I need to get around to doing that to mine at some point in the next few weeks…been using too many freespace wipe bandaids…been lazy.

Oh, and don't listen to people who claim that SSD's lifespan isn't long enough. Yeah, they have a limited life span. Because of the way they work, there is a finite limit to the number of times data can be written to/read from each little piece of memory. In practice…you'll throw away an SSD long before it matters. The guys I know who do solid state physics and can do the math/science that proves why that happens use SSDs. If you want details, I can get them from primary sources…so can google. In this case, the alarmists are wrong.

(Disclaimer: IHNFC if making an image of a paid copy of OS X counts as piracy. I don't care. That's how they do it in the Apple store, and it saves way too much time not to do it. If somehow it is considered piracy and it came down to it, I'd take Apple to court over it.)

Edit: I forgot about it, but jimbob's other advantage is right. I've dropped my laptop–while it was running–upwards of 10 feet off a stage. Apart from eventually getting Apple to give me new top case just because I wanted one (cosmetic damage near the cd slot), everything was fine. I'm not 100% convinced that stopping platters and moving heads off of them while the computer was in freefall would have worked as well as just not having moving parts.

I have experienced HHD lockup on 4 different laptops I had gone through before I finally settled on my current platform.


All due to vibration...


One time it wasn't even stage vibration, as the stage was isolated really well but the ambient resonant frequencies were so intense that they would resonate anything in that field if it was in the same resonance frequency.

So like, I put my hand on the turntable, and it was dead quiet (vibration wise), probably because the SL1200 chassis is specifically tuned not to resonate in the audible frequency range, and then I put my hand on the mixer chassis, and it was vibrating like it had a little sub in it. At some frequencies all the buttons on the mixer resonated and with the lighting it looked kinda weird.

As I was remarking the cool visual my mixer was creating the laptop crapped on me, the tracks that were playing just continued to play on what was cached in ram, and the Traktor became unresponsive. It was luckily at the end of my set, and the next guy was ready to go on 10 mins early...

Any laptop I ever use for live play will always have a SSD from now on, I've never had one fail me as so many HHD's have.

This is great feedback. Thank you everyone. I think I will make sure to save up for a nice SSD to put in my new Macbook Pro once I make the purchase. I didn't think about the vibrations at a club first... but I've had CD's and Vinyl's skip for that reason back in my day... it's just now I'm starting to do the digital thing. Thanks again.