# Storing all sample libs on one large SSD?



## jiten (Dec 5, 2019)

Hi all,

Does anyone have experiences or tests of running an entire orchestral project off of a single SSD via USB 3.1 or TB3? Did a quick search on this but wasn't coming up with anything concrete.

Saw a deal come up today on an 8TB micron drive that I'm somewhat tempted by because it would be nice to have all my libs in one place to easily switch between my desktop and laptop/mobile setup.

I saw some interesting analysis done on NVMe vs SATA SSDs as it relates to sample streaming and load times in Kontakt, but couldn't find anything that specifically looks into the number of voices that can be streamed off a single drive. I suspect that CPU or RAM (I'm on a 64gb machine) would probably bottleneck first before the hard drive hits a breaking point, but I'm not entirely sure.

Might be stating the obvious, but while I may have all of my libs stored on a single 8TB SSD, I'm only ever going to be using some (much smaller) subset on whatever project I have active. So the metric should be whether I could stream enough off of it to not run into any problems on a large project?

Anyways, curious to hear people's thoughts on this.


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## JohnG (Dec 5, 2019)

I would never do that, personally, because I'm scarred from decades of experiences of disk failures. And some measure of superstition I suppose.

If you want transferability and portability, instead I would get an external drive that holds two or four (mine is four) SSDs and put libraries on that.


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## jiten (Dec 5, 2019)

JohnG said:


> I would never do that, personally, because I'm scarred from decades of experiences of disk failures. And some measure of superstition I suppose.
> 
> If you want transferability and portability, instead I would get an external drive that holds two or four (mine is four) SSDs and put libraries on that.



Thanks John. I do keep backups of all my libraries (both locally and cloud via BackBlaze) so am a bit less concerned about drive failure.

Finding an encosure that holds multiple SSDs is certainly a good idea, but it would be kind of nice to have it all in the form factor of a single SSD provided there is no performance or bottleneck issue.


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## JohnG (Dec 5, 2019)

it's very compact -- a lot of guys use them. It's a Thunderbay from Other World Computing and runs "real good" for me. And it's compatible with pretty much all the disk manufacturers I looked at, so that's a plus too -- pretty sure you can put SSDs or old HDDs in it too, so if you are using one for local backup or just something that isn't high performance that's nice too.

But I understand One Disk To Rule Them All. I just would be afraid to lose it no matter how much backup I had. It takes a loooong time to download that stuff if it's offsite.


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## jbuhler (Dec 5, 2019)

JohnG said:


> it's very compact -- a lot of guys use them. It's a Thunderbay from Other World Computing and runs "real good" for me. And it's compatible with pretty much all the disk manufacturers I looked at, so that's a plus too -- pretty sure you can put SSDs or old HDDs in it too, so if you are using one for local backup or just something that isn't high performance that's nice too.
> 
> But I understand One Disk To Rule Them All. I just would be afraid to lose it no matter how much backup I had. It takes a loooong time to download that stuff if it's offsite.


Which one do you have? Any issues with it unexpectedly disconnecting? That seems to be the main issue I'm seeing in reviews for the TB3 Thunderbay 4 version.


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## Michael Antrum (Dec 6, 2019)

I’ve run most of my libraries from 2tb SSDs in tb enclosures for years. This BF I picked up a 4 Tb Samsung QVO SSD put it in a relatively inexpensive USB 3.1 hi speed enclosure and its just as rapid.

On my laptop I installed one of the 2Tb NVME SSD’s which runs at aroud 3500 mb/s rather than SATA 3 speed of around 500. But when streaming samples you don’t really notice that much of a difference in practical terms.

As for reliability, as you are reading rather than writing to the SSD‘s they should be pretty solid. in any case I bought a couple of inexpensive mechanical drives to back up the libraries with - you can get a 4tb drive for about £80 these days.....


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## JohnG (Dec 6, 2019)

jbuhler said:


> Which one do you have? Any issues with it unexpectedly disconnecting? That seems to be the main issue I'm seeing in reviews for the TB3 Thunderbay 4 version.



It says Thunderbay 43 on my Mac's system report. Works fine w no problems here.


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## gsilbers (Dec 6, 2019)

Im
On the same boat. I saw that 8tb micrón and
Would like have all samples there plus audio drive. I did see some interesting enclosures. There was one that looks like a normal external drive but has two 2.5 drives inside so not only would be nice to have the 8tb but also a hdd for backups and such. A lot slower of course.

I think most of use are still under the impression that having multiple hard drives is better but that’s from the hdd disk spinning days.

but that micron quo’s be ideal since the price is very nice compared to getting 2x 4tb drives.


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## sathyva (Dec 28, 2019)

I use a Sonnet PCIe card with 4x2Go NVMe (in RAID0) for my entire soundbank and beside that I have a backup of all the soundbanks on several "classic" hardrives. Works great so far...


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## storyteller (Dec 28, 2019)

The concept on using multiple drives is that it can reduce latency and allow you to use a reduced kontakt buffer under certain scenarios. For example, many people here put each orchestral section on separate drives to increase performance in real-time playback for densely written orchestrations.


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## gsilbers (Dec 28, 2019)

storyteller said:


> The concept on using multiple drives is that it can reduce latency and allow you to use a reduced kontakt buffer under certain scenarios. For example, many people here put each orchestral section on separate drives to increase performance in real-time playback for densely written orchestrations.



I thought that was for hdd and for ssd its not necessary.

I just remember reading several posts about it but not really doing any tests or researching speeds and comparisons.


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## JohnG (Dec 28, 2019)

gsilbers said:


> I thought that was for hdd and for ssd its not necessary.
> 
> I just remember reading several posts about it but not really doing any tests or researching speeds and comparisons.



I agree with @gsilbers -- I think the "multiple SSDs is better" hypothesis remains that -- a hypothesis.

I do, in fact, spread my SSD libraries over multiple drives, but in most cases that is because I have a lot of small SSDs lying about. 

It makes sense that, at the margin, if you distribute samples among PCIe-based drives, M.2 and SATA, I would think you would take advantage of greater bus capacity. However, this advantage may in fact be so marginal as to be nonexistent as a practical matter.


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## storyteller (Dec 28, 2019)

The theory is more based on voice counts and simultaneous sample playback. For example, a string run using a multi-mic library may eat up thousands of voices and stream hundreds of samples. While at the same time, a dynamic drum roll on a multi-mic library might do the same thing. Throw in John Williams-esque wood wind runs and a crazy brass setup like Berlin Brass and the voices/sample counts grow exponentially. If those types of orchestrations are played back simultaneously, it would almost certainly bring any single SSD to its knees unless buffers are increased or latency is increased. The CPU isn't the bottleneck at that point. It would be HD bandwidth. 

It would be heavily mitigated on SSDs vs spindle drives, but still can present issues based on the orchestration. I do agree that it is basically mandatory on spindle drives, but I still believe the same would apply for SATA SSDs. Probably not much of an issue from an internal Apple SSD though.

And also, certain sample libraries already require higher buffers on SATA SSDs for simple playback due to the scripting. EDNA Earth comes to mind here... so that would add further complexity in a heavy orchestration.


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## Technostica (Dec 28, 2019)

Depending on workflow, I can see a single SATA SSD for samples being a bottleneck at times.
Surprised it hasn't been thoroughly tested and the info common knowledge by now as PCIe drives are fairly cheap and large and for PC Tower users it can be easy to install 3 or 4.


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## Dracarys (May 21, 2020)

Has there been any updates or benches on this topic? I'm currently trying to decide on a 2tb(x2) vs one 4tb for a laptop.


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## GtrString (May 21, 2020)

I have run my libraries from external 2tb +1tb enclosures for about two years and no failures. Remember that the drives still needs about 20% empty space to perform the best. I have backups of the ssd’s on a 6tb regular WD drive, so if they fail, I can transfer back to a new ssd. Most libraries you can also download again as another backup option, so Im happy enough with this system.


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## DavoM (May 21, 2020)

I currently have a MacBook Pro 2017 i7 Quad Core with a 1TB NVMe internal hard drive. I need to get an external hard drive for samples. By transferring my samples to a standard 550m/sec 1TB Samsung SSD, will I notice a huge slowdown? Should I go for the slightly better USB 3.2 Crucial X8 that has read writes of around 1050m/s, or shall I go the whole hog with a TB3 SSD/ TB3 enclosure and NvMe?


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## Sunny Schramm (May 21, 2020)

system, cubase and all my libraries on one "970 Evo Plus" - no problems at all. but my projects arent that big - I think max 30 tracks with kontakt and some other vst´s.


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## toomanynotes (May 24, 2020)

Sunny Schramm said:


> system, cubase and all my libraries on one "970 Evo Plus" - no problems at all. but my projects arent that big - I think max 30 tracks with kontakt and some other vst´s.


 More than enough, I always find it baffling the people that use 'massive' 200 track orchestration projects don't sound any better than a 20 track with good orchestration. Kinda like a big dick competition. A small dick can get the job done...Im not sayin i have a small one.


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