# SSD failure and VSL libraries



## stigc56 (Aug 20, 2022)

Hi
This morning I noticed that my Sample Library 3 didn't mounted upon boot. Running a repair routine in the -Mac- Disc Utility was rather disappointing, the drive was damaged. It's a pretty new 4TB Samsung EVO870 and it holds among others some VSL libraries using their new Ilok system. I have to admit that I didn't spend much time during the transition to the new Vienna Assistant to get acquainted with the whole concept, which I now regret. 
The picture here shows how my libraries licenses are stored in the Ilok setup.
So my question is: Can I reformat the drive - which hopefully will make it work again - and install the libraries again or am I in deep trouble here?
Regards Stig


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## FireGS (Aug 20, 2022)

Format and reinstall should do the trick, unless theres actual hardware damage that caused the failure. From a license point of view, you should be totally fine.


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## stigc56 (Aug 20, 2022)

Thank You!
I will go ahead!


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## WandaS (Aug 20, 2022)

*Run Techtool on it . A bad block test or Volume test will tell you if it's bad
and it's still probably under warranty.*


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## Dr.Quest (Aug 20, 2022)

There was a thread with the warning that 4TB Samsung EVO870 are prone to failure but I did a search and can't find that one now.


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## Dr.Quest (Aug 20, 2022)

A quick Google search turns up this.








Samsung 870 EVO - Beware, certain batches prone to failure!


Certain 870 EVO 4TB and 2TB drives are affected by early failures where they develop uncorrectable errors and some data just cannot be read from them anymore. This seems to primarily affect drives produced in January/February 2021. For example, i have three 870 EVO 4TB, only one is affected (so...




www.techpowerup.com


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## stigc56 (Aug 20, 2022)

I bought my 4TB in 2022, so hopefully it's okay, but I will run the Techtool test.
Thanks a lot!


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## Vladinemir (Oct 12, 2022)

Which SSD type do you recommend for Sy'd DS I, Historic Winds and their free stuff? NVMe or is SATA enough? My CPU supports M.2 PCIe Gen 3 x4. Even though users reported that some of their libs cause high CPU load on SSD too, keeping them on HDD will not help either.


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## Ben (Oct 12, 2022)

For Dimension Strings I highly recommend to use at least a SATA SSD.
Historic Winds and the free libraries should run perfectly well from a SATA SSD, and they will also run from HDD as well - but I don't recommend that.


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## JacksonTree (Oct 12, 2022)

This is something that despite viewing myself as somewhat technically adept, befuddles me. I’m imaging my system drive and my samples drive to a backup drive, but if my system crashes and I need a new system I’m not going to want to restore from my decade old system… and I won’t have the old system available to unregister my old desktop. To me this is relevant from both a native access and an iLok perspective… am I thinking of this wrong?


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## Vladinemir (Oct 30, 2022)

Ben said:


> For Dimension Strings I highly recommend to use at least a SATA SSD.
> Historic Winds and the free libraries should run perfectly well from a SATA SSD, and they will also run from HDD as well - but I don't recommend that.


Will NVMe without DRAM be sufficient? It looks like most of them (1 TB ~€100) use SLC. This could be a problem for writing but not sure how it will impact reading. Also, VSL libs are stored as large files, but I guess they are decompressed during the playback and treated as small sample files so random access read speed is more important(?) Now I'm wondering if SATA SSD with DRAM might perform better with Dimension Strings. Maybe @Pictus could chime in too.


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## Pictus (Oct 31, 2022)

Vladinemir said:


> Maybe @Pictus could chime in too.


I have no idea how program XXXX behaves, but this may give some idea for Kontakt





NVMe vs SATA: Will it make Kontakt faster?


On the subject of the benefit of NVMe over a modest SATA SSD, specifically as it relates to Kontakt, I've commented here and elsewhere that: At least with Kontakt's compressed samples, NVMe is completely wasted. Decent SATA SSDs are too for that matter: I bottleneck my CPU decompressing the...




vi-control.net


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## Ben (Oct 31, 2022)

Some libraries will benefit from an NVMe drive, especially the Synchron Pianos; the CPU and RAM usage will be slightly lower with NVMe drives.
Most important is the 4k random read speed, as well as the drives read latency.


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