I recently did a test where I put the same 5.0 SFX on a HDD and an SSD. Then both imported into Basehead.
When I then go to transfer the sound from Basehead to Pro Tools (the PT session is also on a SSD), they both always transferred at the same time.
Is it then safe to assume that there is no performance boost from using an SSD as my SFX drive?
I'll need to upgrade to 4tb soon so will just stick with an HDD if there are no benefits using an SSD in Basehead
A few things to keep in mind.
Firstly, HDD vs SSD when it comes to which is going to perform better comes down to the amount of data you need to be transferring in a single thread and the size of the file. Working with just a single sample file of a few MB at a time you will find almost no improvement between SSD and HDD because there simply is not a huge amount of data to transfer at all so a HDD can read the data basically with the same efficiency. However, once you move to a DAW for instance and you have multiple tracks all reading data from a HDD (maybe recordings) that are not stored in RAM then this becomes much more important as a HDD can struggle to read fragmented audio constantly from a platter based mechanical drive.
The second thing to keep in mind is that when you Spot/DnD a file from BaseHead to your DAW the file has to be "transcoded" to the transfer samplerate you have set in your BH options. This requires BH to read the file and process it into a temp file on your main drive and this processing requires CPY time so drive speeds will not matter if the process time is limited by the CPU.
For large SFX collections, a simple HDD is perfectly fine and often so much cheaper you can buy 2 and keep things properly backed up.
