Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Garritan CFX on system SSD - 153GB left

Thanks for explaining this. I think people were not clear on these points.You said: "I'm sure you know", but I think people often do not.

BTW, you didn't mention what IS the cause of piano latency, so I will: the Windows audio software chain. And that's where ASIO comes to the rescue.

More good stuff:I'll add some personal experience ...

In my first use of VST software I used a 2006 era Dell laptop, an early core Duo at 1.7 GHz with 2 GB RAM, an 80 GB disk, running Windows XP. That's a slow box by any measure ... yet I was able to play four pianos SIMULTANEOUSLY with no problems. The disks were not a problem at all. The only "fix" was to install a proper audio interface with its ASIO driver ... to take out the latency in the only place it existed: the Windows audio software chain.

MacMacMac, according to PC World, the average retail price of 128GB SSDs, plummeted from $130 to $40 between 2012 and 2016. They say nothing about bigger SSDs, but I can imagine the trend must have been the same for them. Possibly the price drop wasn't as drastic for bigger SSDs, since the 128GB ones have always had the highest price per gigabyte, as far as I know.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3040591/storage/ssd-prices-plummet-again-close-in-on-hdds.html

Absolutely. I bought a couple of 1TB Samsung 850 EVOs in January 2016, for about £210 each. Current price is over £295. SSDs in general have actually increased in price over the last 18 months, and show no sign of returning even to former levels, let alone going below them. There remains a worldwide shortage of NAND flash memory and increasing demand for SSDs which will keep prices high for the foreseeable future (by which I mean a year or more).

Theodor,
My experience is more like karvala's. He's looking at the last 18 months. I was looking at that plus a bit more.
So any price drops in 2012, 2013, and much of 2014 were not in my line of sight.
And I don't know whether to expect major changes in the near future.

BTW, I was looking at high-end Samsung Pro models. Those were mostly stable over that period.

The graph on PC World shows 128GB SSD disks fell in price constantly until the beginning of 2016. The graph doesn't show the development after that point in time, which was actually about 18 months ago. So yes, prices may have gone up after that, I've never objected to that. In fact I said earlier in this thread myself, that the prices have gone up.

Nevertheless, as I've said in another thread, I could get a Corsair Force LE 240GB in late november 2016, for about $60, 549 SEK, and that was the lowest price I've ever seen. That was only about six months ago. The prices may have developed differently in the US, than in Sweden, or Europe, but here in Sweden, there were good offers only late last year.

I've never seen any offers on SSDs all this year, and I agree with you, that it's unlikely the prices will drop. Even if this NAND flash memory shortage will be over today, it'll take time for the prices to go down, if they ever will. I believe it'll the wise thing, for me at least, to make do with what I have, and start thinking about getting a new computer, if the old one starts breaking down. I might even be able to squeeze out $100 for a 240-256GB SSD later this year, or early next year.

I guess I should have shopped at swedish.ssd.com