Sound At The Speed Of Flash
If you use your DAW for a lot of audio work (as opposed to MIDI), then your memory bus will be critical to the performance of your system. Hard drive performance is also vital, as the speed of your disk has a direct impact on the number of simultaneous audio tracks you can run.
Hard drives are neither as fast nor as reliable as RAM. However, flash memory has been reducing in price and increasing in capacity over the past few years – to such an extent that it is now possible to buy a computer that uses flash memory for its ‘hard drive’.
These new drives are known as solid-state drives, as they have no moving parts. The Dell Latitude D420 features a 32GB SSD from Sandisk, which boasts a theoretical increase in boot time of 34%, and an increase in overall system performance of 23%. Although much more expensive and lower in capacity than standard hard drives, the boost in speed and reliability should soon make them a DAW favourite.