I have a couple of USB2-based external SSD’s with around 400-450MB/s read speed. But I have been interested in possibly upgrading to a new super fast SSD, either a raid cabinet or a ssd m.2 model in an external closure, ex: Samsung X5 or similar.
Do you have experience with super fast external SSD drives for sample libraries and plugins. Do you get the full advantage of the read speed difference?
I’m still rocking a SAMSUNG EVO over USB… Never had any experience with Thunderbolt or RAID SSDs since the speed I get at the moment ~450 MB/S totally satisfies my needs.
I am on a 2015 27" iMac I am more inclined to upgrade the internal drive, since I am getting those speeds there, hehe
I have 3 1 TB traditional drives in a RAID 0 (stripe), which gives me 3 TB of usuable storage. At the time when I set it up, The drives were about 75.00 each and a 1 TB SSD drive was well north of $300. My setup is as fast as an SSD and with a ton of storage, which is what I wanted. I know… what if a drive dies? Got it covered. I do image based backups of the whole computer, so I can replace a disk and restore the volume. Bang for the buck. These days whenever I do decide to replace my rig or storage, it will be all SSD drives. They are sooo cheap now! RAID only if you have solid backups and feel comfortable with that technology.
For SSD’s the Crucial MX500’s are not too shabby and the 2TB can be had for less than £200, whereas the 1TB is just a shade under £100. I have some of my Kontakt Libraries on a couple of the 1TB and they load nice and fast once you have done batch resave,
Mike, I’m running Samsung evo 970s on my motherboard …500gig and 2 tb these are m.2 NVME and are really quick …I don’t know if there are external cases that will support the m.2 transfer speed … I’ve not researched it yet …but just so you know … my omnisphere 2.6 libraries…you can preview them as fast as you can click them !
Wow, and did you do any read/write speed tests? For Omnisphere the drive speed is even more important than Kontakt libraries, as it runs mainly from the drives to avoid loading up insane amount of RAM
I went off specs, but I have used them for other projects…easily 4 to 5 times faster then sata ssd …its like the same jump from going from a sata mechanical harddrive to a sata ssd …going from sata ssd to m.2 nvme …
Just to add a little more clarity on my disk distribution. I have my Omnisphere library on a 500gb M.2 evo, which gives pretty fast load times. Kontakt libraries are sat between two 1tb Crucial MX500 drives. The one-shots and loops are sat on a 500gb Samsung 840evo, which is slower than the MX500 but not that you would notice.
Hello all
for me the ssd is better than standard hdd in speed reading
but in my opinion a good configuration has several hard drive dispatch like this :
1 ssd of 500Gn max for the system and the software (DAW, plugin,… )
2 or more hdd sata 3 for library VST
i am not sure that the saving time for loadeing library is high, because when you load a library all samples are loaded into the memory and after that there is no access on the hard drive, loading a kontakt library is not streaming, everything is in memory
sample takes less processor load than virtual synthetizer, and for virtual synthetizer it is the same thing when you load in a track omnisphere or zebra, it is loaded in memory but in this case everything is processed so you must have a very high efficient processor like core i7 or ryzen 5 or more but it doesn’t access to your hard drive.
on the other side you have your system, your DAW and everybody know that windows and software generate a lot of access to hard drive in writing and reading, so if you put a ssd for the system and DAW it will be a better solution to keep the standard hard drive and put the vst on a ssd
the system and software read /write all the time
the library is one shot, you load your library and when the load is finished there is no more access
so yes SSD is a very good choice for the system and software
this is my next step for my computer, replace the hdd by a ssd
That is correct, Kontakt loads everything to RAM, but Omnisphere, Keyscape etc. which I use a lot use direct from disc streaming, while only having the first part of the sound loaded into RAM.
There are presets in Keyscape creative that are literally over 10GB, so I am glad it does not load that all into RAM haha.
I wish you could change so Kontakt did not load everything into RAM, and worked more like Omnisphere. Because my RAM in my big template is full, but my CPU could handle more, and I have max RAM already 32GB on my computer. =/
yes you’re right, for streaming ssd is the best in reading speed
i am not shure that kontakt offer the possibility to setup streaming
i will check that, but not sure it is possible
Sadly I think it is not, not even in Kontakt 6. =/
Omnisphere is using the best of both worlds I think. You can have huge sounds, they load pretty fast since you stream most of the sounds from disc, but also since some of it is in RAM it doesn’t tax the CPU too much either.
I have the Samsung T5, it is designed for USB C, it is SSD… so it’s about 490 MB/s. Super cool. It fells as if all that info was on my main hard drive, no lag at all, quick response.
I travel with 2 of them, one that’s 500GB and other that’s 1TB.
