# Buyer's remorse with a slow external 4TB SSD? Can't hit ~500 MB/s reading speed. What am I missing?



## michael_montauk (Oct 25, 2022)

Hello.

I'm on a Legion5 15ACH6H (Win10) and recently got myself a crucial mx500 4TB SSD drive to store my sample libraries externally.

I read in a couple of vi threads that reading speed of around 500MB/s would be sufficient for Kontakt libraries.

Unfortunately I don't come near the wanted ~500MB/s reading speed.

View attachment 87470


I have put the SSD into a Inateck 3.2 Gen2 enclosure... https://amzn.eu/d/gR9RfXV

The cable is a "USB-Typ-C-to-Typ-A 3.1 Gen 2-cable capable of 10 Gbit/s" 

How can I improve the reading speed? 

500 MB/s with an external SSD on a Legion5 that has USB A inputs 3.2 Gen1 should be possible, right?

Would a USB type c to type c cable improve the speed? 
Should I use the Type C USB 3.2 Gen2 connectorbetter results? 
Unfortunateyl the Legion5 doesn't have/supports Thunderbolt.

Do I have to get another enclosure like the OWC Merkur-Elite Pro Dual Mini
https://amzn.eu/d/8BpemEnor this this ICY BOX?
https://amzn.eu/d/32xbb9c
I don't know if the crucial mx500 was a good investment or if I better should have went for a nvme ssd m.2 solution...

I'm a little bit confused and frustrated.
What am I missing?

Read through a couple of nvme vs sdd threads... my take away was that ssd would be enough (bottleneck) and the better reading speeds of nvme's only necessary for video production... was this the wrong conclusion?

Warm regards,
Michael


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## Hadrondrift (Oct 25, 2022)

The limiting factor here is *not* the SSD, the Crucial is generally a good choice and capable of 500MB/s at SATA-Ports. I think, buyer's remorse isn't indicated in this regard. The controller of the Inateck should not be the problem either, I have several cases from this manufacturer myself and have always been satisfied so far.

Your speeds are in no way really bad for USB 3.2 Gen *1, *I wouldn't even expect full 500 MB/s at those ports. Definitely try an USB 3.2 Gen *2* port, if available. It also can't hurt to try a real (and short) USB-C to USB-C cable. (The USB naming convention can be confusing, the old USB 3.0 is sometimes named USB 3.2 Gen 1).


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## cleverr1 (Oct 25, 2022)

For sequential read I get ~560MB/s for both a Samsung T5 USB drive and a Samsung QVO in a Ugreen 6Gbps USB / SATA box,  using either the USB C or USB A 3.1 mk2 sockets. This is the same performance as the internal SATA Samsung QVOs in my VEPro box. The VEPro box has USB 3.0 ports and the USB SSDs connected to those achieve ~460MB/s. My other external USB SSDs are connected via USB 3.1 hubs and test at ~450MB/s.
Here's a screenshot of a 4TB QVO in the uGreen connected by USB C:


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## davidson (Oct 25, 2022)

Those speeds are what you should expect with that (and most) enclosures. You might hit 500 with the uGreen mentioned above.


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## cleverr1 (Oct 25, 2022)

It looks like USB 3.2 gen 1 is the bottleneck.





USB Type-C and USB 3.1 (now called USB 3.2) Explained


USB Type-C promises to change the landscape of PC connectivity, but it brings with it some confusion as well. Let's break down USB Type-C and USB 3.1.




www.onlogic.com


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## cleverr1 (Oct 25, 2022)

michael_montauk said:


> Hello.
> 
> I'm on a Legion5 15ACH6H (Win10) and recently got myself a crucial mx500 4TB SSD drive to store my sample libraries externally.
> 
> ...



[edit] - Your Legion5 15ACH6H has USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports so plug the drive directly into one of those, disable any real time AV from that drive, and you should get the full ~560MB/s read


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## CSS_SCC (Oct 25, 2022)

I have quite a lot of external drives and enclosures in which I have added drives myself (over 25 drives collected over the years).

Most of the time is the cable that is quite poorly built and does not offer the full signal integrity for the maximum speed of the USB port that you are using. I have a few cables that came with the external disks and enclosures that I bought and most of them are "interchangeable" as they perform similarly. Two of them have been abysmal (offering only 150-200Mbps) and I have relegated them to an USB hub that hosts my iLok, Steinberg Licenser, microSD card reader, Wacom tablet and Logitech Unifying Receiver. No issues in that function.


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## storyteller (Oct 25, 2022)

FWIW, the UGreen enclosures don't work with Samsung 870 EVOs. You might be having a similar problem with the Crucial MX500 and Inatek.

Even though they cap out at around 480mb/s, the Sabrent USB3.0 enclosures have been rock solid on everything I've thrown at it. But I do prefer Thunderbolt 3 enclosures when possible. 

Also, the RND4K is a more important metric for samples than sequential read. For video, the sequential read is a more telling metric.


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## cleverr1 (Oct 25, 2022)

storyteller said:


> Also, the RND4K is a more important metric for samples than sequential read. For video, the sequential read is a more telling metric.


Interesting comment. Why is that?


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## Technostica (Oct 25, 2022)

The specs below show that only the USB C ports are rated for 10Gbs.
To get the full performance the caddy and cable must support 10Gbs.
So if you use the other ports you will not get the full 500+ GBs.



https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/Legion/Lenovo_Legion_5_15ACH6H/Lenovo_Legion_5_15ACH6H_Spec.pdf



So hook it up to one of the USB C ports.


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## timbit2006 (Oct 25, 2022)

The key here is sustained random read/write. Sure it can go to 500mb/s for a short while but there's no chance it will do that continuously for hours or more likely minutes on end without bogging down. I'm sorry you've learned the hard way and got a bad recommendation. Never trust a manufacturers specs, they have every reason to lie. I have an MX500 that I removed from my PC and gave to my mom for typical web browsing and office work purposes.
The ports are probably not causing the problem like most here in this thread thinks. Just a quick search on some review sites that actually test the specs shows this drive will drop down to less than 100mb/s pretty quick with real word tasks.


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## Technostica (Oct 25, 2022)

timbit2006 said:


> The key here is sustained random read/write. Sure it can go to 500mb/s for a short while but there's no chance it will do that continuously for hours or more likely minutes on end without bogging down. I'm sorry you've learned the hard way and got a bad recommendation. Never trust a manufacturers specs, they have every reason to lie. I have an MX500 that I removed from my PC and gave to my mom for typical web browsing and office work purposes.
> The ports are probably not causing the problem like most here in this thread thinks. Just a quick search on some review sites that actually test the specs shows this drive will drop down to less than 100mb/s pretty quick with real word tasks.


It's being tested in CrystalDiskMsrk which will show if it's optimality configured. 
Real world usage will vary of course. 

Having looked at the specs of the laptop and a photo of the caddy, the obvious solution is to use a cable which is USB C on both ends.
I say this because the caddy appears to be Type-C only and the laptop only supports 10Gbs via the Type-C ports. 
Whether you notice a difference when using the drive to read samples is questionable.


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## EvilDragon (Oct 25, 2022)

cleverr1 said:


> Interesting comment. Why is that?


Because direct-from-disk streaming reads small chunks of samples from all over the disk, randomly, at will, based on which pieces from which samples you're playing back need to be fetched. Sequential speed really doesn't matter in this context.

For Kontakt in particular, the most important metric is 4KQD1, not QD32, since Kontakt is not optimized for parallel disk I/O (which is what SSDs are best at).


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## timbit2006 (Oct 25, 2022)

Technostica said:


> It's being tested in CrystalDiskMsrk which will show if it's optimality configured.
> Real world usage will vary of course.
> 
> Having looked at the specs of the laptop and a photo of the caddy, the obvious solution is to use a cable which is USB C on both ends.
> ...


USB 3.2 Gen 1 supports up to 5gb/s so I'm not too sure what the difference in performance would be, if any at all.


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## Technostica (Oct 25, 2022)

timbit2006 said:


> USB 3.2 Gen 1 supports up to 5gb/s so I'm not too sure what the difference in performance would be, if any at all.


The OP is testing with Crystal Disk Mark which at Q32 should give a sequential read of about 550.
That's well above USB 5Gbs.
But as a few of us have said, in real world usage there may not be a noticeable or any difference and especially with Kontakt.
But in some scenarios there may be a difference, so why not use a cable that doesn't restrict the potential performance.

Note.
To get Crystal DiskMark to show the maximum sequential read speed, you might need to change the queue depth to 32.
The fact that you need to do this shows why in real world usage you rarely see such speeds.
As already implied above, this has no impact for Kontakt performance.


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## colony nofi (Oct 25, 2022)

YES!!!


EvilDragon said:


> Because direct-from-disk streaming reads small chunks of samples from all over the disk, randomly, at will, based on which pieces from which samples you're playing back need to be fetched. Sequential speed really doesn't matter in this context.
> 
> For Kontakt in particular, the most important metric is 4KQD1, not QD32, since Kontakt is not optimized for parallel disk I/O (which is what SSDs are best at).


This is important information that is seemingly not often understood (or spoken about) but composers.
4KQD1 is far more important for kontakt (and some of the other sample players) as a metric. And the numbers may seem low - but wait till you see the numbers on other drives (like old spinning rust!)

Atto's disk tools are very useful for seeing how drives behave in different circumstances as well. Even just adjusting the size of the blocks being read/written changes speeds by orders of magnitude (!!)

Now - while you don't have the worlds fastest drive, it is unlikely to change your workflow much. The real world differences between SSD's and even NVME's that are 10x the speed of yours are not as noticeable as you might think given the fetishisation of disk benchmarks! I'm lucky enough to have a bunch of different types of drives and connections - and our internal studios benchmarking shows that there's no need to throw out the SATAIII SSD's quite yet. They make perfectly serviceable sample lib drives.

Testing a drive that blackmagic reports as 4000MB/s, I can see (thanks to some recompiled linux tools) that kontakt is LOADING in instruments at below 200MB/s. And that is normal behaviour. . And nothing to be concerned about. (Now, we'd all love faster loading, but as EvilDragon said, kontakt is not optimised to enable faster parallel reads which SSD's are great at! And its very unlikely that will change in the short or even medium term)

FWIW, this same disk 4KiB reads with a queue depth of 1 on 128MiB files reads at 127MB/s.

Rather than worry so much about benchmarks that don't matter hugely for real world use, just put the drive to work. If you are super concerned, beg / borrow a drive from a friend with better stats, load a few kontakt libs onto it, and run tests using first your drive, and then theirs. You'll likely be pleasantly surprised at your own drive's performance difference being not that great compared to your friend.
As with anything tech, you can pay tonnes of money and get faster. Of course. But its not always necessary for the types of things composers do.

And this is a pot calling a kettle black considering the tech I muck around with at times....


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## ptram (Oct 26, 2022)

I'm tied to the USB 3.0 ports of my Mac Pro 2013, so I can't expect very high speed from my external drives. But I wonder if using better cables might help.

I'm currently using USB 3 cables (the ones with the blue socket), apparently of decent quality. They are a short run (less than 1m), so I wonder if going with something like the triple-shielded cables from Ugreen may be worth, or irrelevant.

Paolo


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## michael_montauk (Oct 26, 2022)

A huge thank you and a big hug to all of you. I will report back when the type c to type c cable (3.2 Gen2) cable arrives. 

Can I ask a followup? 
When running 4KQD1 and RND4K benchmarks what would a "good", sufficient readout for loading kontakt libraries be? 

But I will also take the suggestion to heart to test loading times myself in real life scenarios  

In general, I am questioning my decision to grab the mx500 4TB for 299€ on prime day when I probably can get two 2TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD 2TB - M.2 NVMe for 400€... reading through the other threads here on vi control I didn't get the feeling that the nvme's are dismissed at all when going for better loading times... bottleneck included... 

to be too much ocd about those questions doesn't feel great and I would love to make and write music instead of thinking about this... it's just, when spending 300-400€ on library space I want to make sure it's the best choice yi can make at this point in time...


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## colony nofi (Oct 26, 2022)

michael_montauk said:


> A huge thank you and a big hug to all of you. I will report back when the type c to type c cable (3.2 Gen2) cable arrives.
> 
> Can I ask a followup?
> When running 4KQD1 and RND4K benchmarks what would a "good", sufficient readout for loading kontakt libraries be?
> ...


I would personally take single larger drives over multiple smaller drives. Just from an organisational stand point, and wanting to keep things as simple as possible (and I work on some bloody complicated rigs). But that is very much just ME - and there's no reason for others to abide by that mantra. 

You will need enclosures for your EVO's - and to make use of their speed, you'll need to use fast interconnects - which will also increase the cost. 

I would likely find the way to get the MOST storage rather than the absolute fastest storage - but of course only to a point. 

I have found the rocket NVME drives to be extremely good value, and I've now deployed quite a few for different purposes. I wouldn't spend the money on gen 4 over gen 3, but I would spend the money on NVME over SATA III for future proofing.

So I might be in tension with myself there... and its not an easy decision. Tech me would hit the nvme route, composer me would tell tech me to shut up and grab as much space as possible.

Benchmarks - I would rely on timed tests between different machines personally. Especially because different samplers operate differently when it comes to reading the samples. (Some are much faster than Kontakt!). Build a small benchmark template that suits YOUR workflow. I know that doesn't really help for comparison - but then again, most people who run SATA III SSD's do perfectly good work and don't find the load times a massive bottleneck (unless you run old school massive templates with everything loaded into ram in one go)


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## EvilDragon (Oct 26, 2022)

I have a bunch of 1 and 2 TB SSDs, a mix of Samsung EVO 850 and 860. Works perfectly fine!

Most any SSD will perform 4KQD1 test like 100x better than a rust drive, which should be plenty to draw over 1k stereo voices from one drive at any point in time... your CPU should end up being saturated sooner than SSD throughput. Even at QD1!


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