# SSDs: 1 vs multiple for VI Orchestra



## brandowalk (May 18, 2019)

For my Mac Mini (2012) - I currently use 5 different external SSDs to spread different orchestra groups (Strings, Solo Strings, WWs, Brass, etc) - 1.7TB of samples. I did this as I read somewhere when I was starting with VIs that this was a good practice. 

I'm now needing more space for libraries and wondering if this multi-drive approach is really more effective than having one (ie. 2TB) SSD? Anyone have experience with this kind of comparison and the impact of performance? (1 vs multiple drives). I'm hoping to get some info before I purchase more drives. Thanks in advance.

BW
https://musicbybrandonwalker.com


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## jbuhler (May 18, 2019)

brandowalk said:


> For my Mac Mini (2012) - I currently use 5 different external SSDs to spread different orchestra groups (Strings, Solo Strings, WWs, Brass, etc) - 1.7TB of samples. I did this as I read somewhere when I was starting with VIs that this was a good practice.
> 
> I'm now needing more space for libraries and wondering if this multi-drive approach is really more effective than having one (ie. 2TB) SSD? Anyone have experience with this kind of comparison and the impact of performance? (1 vs multiple drives). I'm hoping to get some info before I purchase more drives. Thanks in advance.
> 
> ...


I think that was advice for spinning drives. I haven't run into a botteneck on SSDs, at least up to 2TB.


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## Damarus (May 20, 2019)

IMO I dont know why some users opt for so many drives. Stick to large SSD's. I believe most of the load is taken by your RAM so I think drive performance is not an issue (with SSD's). Someone may want to chime in on that if they have experiences that say otherwise.


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## Dewdman42 (May 20, 2019)

With spinning drives that was more necessary in order to get parallelism in the disk access. With SSD, I don't think you need to worry about that.

I have 2 2TB SSD's in a raid array just for convenience(4TB total), but I am thinking about separating them just to minimize overhead and potential for failure, but it will mean that I have to keep track of which sample libs are on which drive. The raid array does give me higher benchmark scores, but I have not seen ANY difference in project load times or DAW performance.


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## brandowalk (May 20, 2019)

Thanks all for your replies. This is helpful info for my next drive purchase.


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## JohnG (May 20, 2019)

I use multiple SSDs, but doubt there's a huge advantage from doing that as such.

However, you might be able to increase throughput by adding a PCIe card with SATA ports on it. The PCIe bus typically has more capacity than the SATA bus, so I'm told.


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## Dewdman42 (May 20, 2019)

I have done the PCEi card thing and it made no difference to real world performance such as loading a project or streaming in the DAW.


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## Dunshield (May 24, 2019)

I thought too that spreading software libraries over multiple SSD's did make sense.
Did it not have something to do with how VSTi's load their samples?

I was under the impression that some of them load samples in series, others in parallel?
Especially when you're using different libraries through different playback engines like VE + Kontakt + Play etc. it would probably make sense to spread the libraries over several drives?

Also there's the scenario with some Omnisphere patches being loaded and perhaps some other stuff ..
So I thought too that spreading all of these samples over several SSD's was the way to go.


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## X-Bassist (May 24, 2019)

One thing to consider when moving samples, your quickload work (Kontakt) will disappear when moving samples and has to be redone from scratch. For that reason and for simplicity sake I would just add a new drive, but make it a 1TB or better. I’m starting to slow down on adding libraries but went through 5 1TB SSD’s pretty quickly (in 3 years) so I would leave plenty of space for the next big sale.

If you really want to reorganize (one drive better be a 4TB or better) then plan on a few days to get everything back to working order. Finding all your Kontakt player libraries (and other synths that use samples) can take some time. For me, I keep my templetes organized and up to date so it doesn’t matter where the samples live, since I rarely go looking for them. But I do keep them organized by developer on each drive so if I need to find something or lose my templete, I can still find it pretty quickly (even on 7 SSD drives, like I have now). Cheers.


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