# External SSDs for Sample Libraries: A review



## neve (Jun 22, 2014)

This post may be of special interest to composers who use laptops, mac minis and other mobile equipment, but it may also be relevant to those who produce in a fixed location with more powerful systems too. It is a long post, but I thought it’d be worth sharing some of the details of the research I’ve done on using SSDs for sample libraries. I’d most welcome any comments and/or rectifications!

The bottom-line is this: storage drives are the most upgradable component of a music production system that will result in noticeable performance improvement. CPU power is important but not easily upgradable, especially with the more recent motherboards. However, even if you use demanding sample libraries, once you have a 4 to 6 core 64bit processor, you don’t have to worry about upgrading it for a good number of years. RAM has become very affordable and it’s a very good investment to make, but it’s easy to reach a limit particularly with laptops or smaller systems. Hard drives, on the other hand, are more easily upgradable as they can be easily set up externally. With thunderbolt speeds, it is and will be possible to house all sample libraries externally with excellent performance results, making it easier to have a modular upgradable system.

Over the last year I have been researching various hard drives configurations and options for working with sample libraries. The first question I researched was whether SSDs’ performance for sample libraries would really justify the noticeable higher price compared to hard disks. The answer is a definitive yes. Sample libraries heavily rely on random access speeds and IOPS (Input/Output Operations per second), and HDDs cannot compete with SSDs on this factor. HDDs IOPS round at about 100 IOPS whereas SSDs can easily exceed 10,000. Another factor is noise: SSDs are much quieter, and for the studio this is always a very important consideration! Finally, the more power the data storage drive has, the less RAM you will need to have to easily work with demanding sample libraries. If your system only allows 32Gb RAM or 16GB RAM (as in my case), you can easily improve the system performance with SSDs without having to upgrade your entire computer to get more RAM. The only downside of SSDs vs HDDs is that they decrease in performance after many writes, which isn’t really a problem for sample library storage since once you install the libraries the operations are mostly reads. I also found much anecdotal evidence from composers posting in this and other forums that SSDs are much better than HDDs for sample libraries. 

The second question was about the data storage interface. Over the last year more external SSDs have come up in USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt interfaces. Older interfaces such as FW800 really don’t take advantage of SSDs speeds, and USB 2.0 would be a terrible bottleneck and definitely not recommended. eSATA is a bit faster than USB 3.0 and convenient but not available for external connections in many computers. There are some USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt to eSATA adapters, but the price you’d pay for them would be better spent in larger capacity USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt drives. Many USB 3.0 and some thunderbolt SSDs are also coming with eSATA connections, so if you have an older system with only eSATA, it’d be a good option to get one of these as it will be able to easily blend with a newer system later on. 

So, the question boiled down to USB 3.0 vs Thunderbolt SSDs. What I found is this: most external SSDs come with a SATAIII 6Gb/s interface that then connects to USB 3 or thunderbolt. So, even though thunderbolt allows for 10Gb/s (or 20 GB/s in generation 2) you wouldn’t be taking advantage of all the thunderbolt speed since the SSDs come in Sata III. An exception to this would be if you daisy chain several drives to make use of all the bandwidth. Another exception would be with PCIe based SSDs which I will examine shortly. USB 3.0 SSDs are cheaper than thunderbolt ones, so, if you have just a few demanding sample libraries this would be a convenient option (at the end of the post I will list some product options). However, in the long run and for more performance, thunderbolt is a better option because it allows for more daisy chaining and ultimately more speed. If you have several very demanding sample libraries this may be a better option. Also, some older macs didn’t come with USB 3 (as mine, which is a mid 2011 macbook pro) in which case instead of buying a USB3 adapter it would be better to go for thunderbolt SSDs from the start.

Newer thunderbolt products are allowing fantastic upgrading options for composers. In particular RAID0 enclosures and PICe based devices allow for near 1000 Mb/s speeds at increasingly competitive prices. A word on RAID: Once you have a backup of all your sample libraries you don’t have to worry too much about the increased disk failure risk with RAID0, and it certainly boosts performance noticeably. If you can afford a RAID0 double SSD configuration you will benefit from its performance even if RAID is software based instead of hardware raid (with newer OS RAID options). However, recent SSDs can be so fast that in many cases you can get away with single drive SSDs.

PCIe is the future of SSDs because it erases the SataIII bottleneck, both for internal configurations with available PCIe slots and for external configurations with PCIe based Thunderbolt drives. For example, have a look at OCZ Revodrive 350: http://ocz.com/breakaway It can be plugged into a desktop PCIe slot or connected to a laptop through a PCIe Thunderbolt enclosure such as OWC Mercury Helios 2. With the Revodrive 350 you can get 1800 Mb/s reads and 140,000 IOPS. It comes with VTA (Virtualized Controller Architecture), Sandforce Processors (future versions may use the newer controllers), TRIM enabled, with Garbage Collection, NAND, power failure management and one of the lowest latency in the consumer market at 9ms. For sample libraries this would mean the SSD would take a lot of the work freeing up your system’s RAM and CPU. I’m not sure how VE Pro would use this but I anticipate it would really help distribute the system demands. The 960 GB version sells for $1,299. This is a recent product and I anticipate the price will come down in the coming years. But even now, for that price you get a superb performance for sample library data streaming. So, for the mid-term future, PCIe SSDs are definitely looking good for sample library storage.

Just some words on power supply: some developers such as EW recommend avoiding power saving hard drives. This would make many bus powered HDDs unsuitable for demanding sample libraries such as HW Strings. SSDs are much more energy efficient and recent external bus-powered SSD models can provide excellent performance. However, for daisy chaining or for the fastest systems, it is best to go for an AC powered option due to the power demand from the drives.

With all this in mind, I’ll list some current external SSD options I have found, in the hope that composers looking for storage options may find this helpful! 

Internal storage:
SATAIII Drives:
The Samsung EVO 340 Pro offers what seems to be the best performance to price ratio. You can get the 500 GB for under $250. Other good options I found were the OCZ Vertex 460 and the SandDisk Extreme Pro. 

If you have a large desktop computer with available PCIe ports, I’d say it’d be worth looking into the PCIe SSDs such as the OCZ Revodrive 350, which goes for $1300 (the 960 GB version) or $830 (480 GB). 

External Storage:

Enclosures:
You can always get enclosures to run SSDs designed for internal use. 
In USB 3.0 there are some low cost enclosures for single SSD SATA drives, such as the StarTech Super Speed USB 3 Enclosure. For Thunderbolt, the most competitively priced one is Seagate Thunderbolt Adapter. It is fanless which makes it quiet but the SSD can get too hot. 

For more performance, AC powered dual, 3-bay or 4-bay, hardware RAID0 enabled enclosures can house two SATA SSDs in RAID0 mode. I’ve seen good reviews for Sonnet, OWC, Akitio, Promise and Blackmagic enclosures.

OWC Helios 2 Thunderbolt is a dual PCIe enclosure where you can house up to 2 PCIe SSDs (or other PCIe components such as audio interfaces which is really cool). It already comes with Thunderbolt 2, allowing transfer speeds close to 2000 Mb/s with some PCIe SSDs. I say this would be very future proof, offering great a great upgradable storage system. At $360 is not that expensive when you think of its modular potential. 

The thunderbolt enclosures mentioned above offer two thunderbolt ports that allow for daisy chaining.

For storing just a couple of demanding sample libraries there are some promising bus powered external SSDs:

On USB 3, MyDigital SSD OTG has very good speeds for the price on a mSSD SATA drive. More than 210 Mb/s in their 256 GB, just for $180. It’s bus-powered. 

The new LaCie Rugged SSD for USB 3.0 has speeds approaching 300 Mb/s (a bit more in Thunderbolt), with up to 500 Gb for $500. It also comes with Thunderbolt (available in July).

One I’m looking into getting myself is the Akitio PalmRaid Thunderbolt, up to 500GB of storage in RAID0 mode (software) of two SATA3 mSSDs, arguably offering speeds approaching 700 MB/s. It goes for around $640.

The new Elgato Drive+ Thunderbolt with up to 512GB has received very good reviews about its performance and speed, although it’s one of the pricier options at $780.

The Promise J2 houses two mSSDs in RAID0 mode (software raid), also with up to 512Gb, at around $700. 

External AC-powered Thunderbolt SSDs for more robust solutions, yet portable:

The new LaCie Little Big Disk 2 has 2 PCIe SSDs (Samsung) in RAID0 (software) offering speeds of over 1000 Mb/s, with the 1TB option at $1299. For the performance it offers the high price is actually not all that bad.

Promise, Akitio and OWC offer some other good ac powered high-performance external drives, but these come in the same enclosures they sell, so I reckon it’s better to get their enclosures and buy higher performance SSDs separately.

I should point out that during my research I found the WD Velociraptor Duo which houses two 1Tb 10,000 RPM hard drives that can be configured in RAID0 mode. Totalling 2Tb, it offers read speeds over 250 Mb/s, which are pretty good, and it costs $450. For storing bulky libraries this may be a good option despite not being SSD, given the competitive price for those speeds. For recording audio, this may also be a good option since multiple writes won’t hit its performance as they would do on many SDDs. 

In summary, the best solution will depend on every composer’s needs and the type and quantity of sample libraries they use. But as SDDs fall in price, and stellar performance PCIe based SSDs enter the consumer market, the upgrading options with SSDs will benefit many composers using demanding sample libraries. For my personal needs, I’m looking into getting a high-speed bus-powered thunderbolt external SSD such as the Akitio PalmRaid, to run up to 3 demanding libraries such as the EW Hollywood series or a few Spitfire or 8dio libs in multiple mic configs; and the less demanding libraries in my existing larger Glyph external HDD (at 7200 RPM). As my library collection expands I will look into a PCIe card external thunderbolt enclosure to take advantage of what I see the future of high performance SSDs, such as the Revodrive 350. I think that thunderbolt enclosures really offer great upgradable options and I would encourage those looking for storage options to consider them.

Thank you for reading this long post! This is the result of over a year of intermittently researching storage solutions for sample libraries and I hope that you find some useful ideas. If you think I’m missing something, or if you’d add anything to this, please do! I’d be thankful!


----------



## studioj (Jun 22, 2014)

good info, thx!!


----------



## rgames (Jun 22, 2014)

There's a lot of info there but I can't find the most important piece of info:

How many streaming voices can you get from each option?

I have not seen any correlation between the info you gave and number of streaming voices. I have SSD's that do 400 MB/s and some that do 550 MB/s (seq. read) and both max out around 1200 - 1500 voices for VSL/Kontakt off of two SSD's on single machine (i5 and i7 give the same performance). The other types of read metrics are different but the relative difference is about the same, so, in my experience, number of voices is not correlated with any read speed metric for SSD's with seq. read in the range of 400 - 550 MB/s. Maybe there is a difference at 700 MB/s - I don't know, but you need to show the number of voices in order to show that it makes a practical difference.

Also, maybe there are other properties that do predict the performance we care about (I think seek time is one) - it would be good to show that relationship because, in the end, we only care about number of streaming voices. All the other information is interesting but not very relevant.

rgames


----------



## studioj (Jun 22, 2014)

One thing I would like to see improvement on is load times. rgames, have you noticed improvement in that as the read speed increases? I find performance is library specific, and more burden is put on the CPU in general as supposed to disk speed. But I am definitely eyeing that revo drive 350 even if it is a bit overkill ... libraries are only going to get more complicated and larger... so leaving plenty of bandwidth seems like a good plan if I'm not driven too much by cost. I could place my most taxing libraries (spitfire , OT, cinesamples) on the revo (or 2 of them?) and save the rest for a more standard SATAIII solution.


----------



## EastWest Lurker (Jun 22, 2014)

rgames @ Sun Jun 22 said:


> There's a lot of info there but I can't find the most important piece of info:
> 
> How many streaming voices can you get from each option?
> 
> ...



Yep, I am with Richard on this.


----------



## neve (Jun 22, 2014)

rgames @ Sun Jun 22 said:


> There's a lot of info there but I can't find the most important piece of info:
> 
> How many streaming voices can you get from each option?



Richard and Jay: Very true! I haven't personally tested each of the options I outlined, so I'm sorry to say I don't know... If anybody can provide some data I'd really appreciate it. However, just following the theory, if random access times remain the same, polyphony won't see much change from say 300 Mb/s to 500 Mb/s sequential read speeds as you say since sequential speeds only help in the transfer of specific files (loading times would indeed be improved nonetheless). When working with sample libraries, your computer has to access a bunch of different dispersed files, so what matters most for polyphony is random access in combination with sequential access and the disk's drivers to distribute the operations.

So, drawing from theory to answer your question, to get the most voices you'd have to look into getting the highest random access read speeds (from the standpoint of data storage - the other obvious area is CPU power and RAM) along with very high sequential access speeds. In SATA3, the OCZ Vertex has a random access read speed of around to 100,000 IOPS, and the Samsung 340 Evo is 98,000 IOPS. This is not much higher than some 10,000 RPM HDD but in combination with higher sequential speeds and newer drivers I think it would still give you more polyphony than HDDs with similar random access speeds. In PCIe, the OCZ Revodrive 350 is 135,000 IOPS, and the older but pricier Revo 3x 2 is 140,000 IOPS. In PCIe you can find higher numbers in the order of millions of IOPS but the prices go to the sky - here it would be more effective to upgrade your entire computer system's CPU and RAM. 

Also, using multiple drives would help to prevent the polyphony from saturating the bandwidth, and I think VE Pro would help in distributing the operations among the drives. You'd probably have to set up the DAW and sample player to make the most of higher speeds from the drives.

If anyone has actual voice numbers for SSDs options please jump in! Just tell us what CPU and how much RAM you're using.


----------



## NYC Composer (Jun 23, 2014)

Thanks for all the useful information.

I wanted to bring up a product you didn't mention that few people seem to know about. When I was looking for the cheapest external Thunderbolt enclosure, I came across the dual-bay RocketStor 5212.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/control ... &A=details

It's pretty easy to codify the pros and cons.

Pros-

1. The least expensive (as of then)-$189 at B&H.
2. Takes two SATA drives of either size, it doesn't care. Double bay is nice.
3. Provides SSD Thunderbolt speed (my last test on it was showing about 470 MPS.)
4. It works, at least for me.

Cons-

1. Here's the big one-ONE Thunderbolt port, so it has to be the terminal in any array.
2. Looks like a small white toaster
3. Plastic. I wouldn't be kicking it around a lot.


----------



## neve (Jun 24, 2014)

Thanks Larry for sharing the info on the RocketStor. For the price it could well complement a thunderbolt configuration being at the end of the thunderbolt chain.

Do the drives get too hot? Even with SSDs I think some cooling is always good, even if it's just passive.



NYC Composer @ Mon Jun 23 said:


> 2. Looks like a small white toaster


 :lol:


----------



## NYC Composer (Jun 24, 2014)

neve @ Tue Jun 24 said:


> Thanks Larry for sharing the info on the RocketStor. For the price it could well complement a thunderbolt configuration being at the end of the thunderbolt chain.
> 
> Do the drives get too hot? Even with SSDs I think some cooling is always good, even if it's just passive.
> 
> ...



I've noticed some heat, but not too bad. It's open air, so not as bad as being within an enclosure. The toaster look is not particularly reflective of it's purpose


----------



## lydian91 (Oct 9, 2014)

Has anyone had a chance to compare PCIe and SATA III SSDs for the number of streaming voices? Going PCIe requires a pretty big price jump, so I'd be interested to know if the performance boost (for streaming samples at least) is significant enough to justify the extra cost.


----------



## Allegro (Oct 9, 2014)

Some useful information but here is my question. I hope it isn't thread-hijack-esque irrelevant.
Alot of you guys have mentioned 1500-1800 voices (depending on the vst) as the max voices a single PC can handle and the CPU isn't even on full load. If a lot of the sample portion is loaded into ram, then Which hardware component is the bottleneck here?


----------

