# Samsung 850 PRO 512 vs Sandisk Extreme PRO 480



## mac88104 (Nov 27, 2016)

I already own 2x 850 PRO for system and projects. I am seriously thinking about buying others high-end SATA 3 SSD's to stream my Kontakt based libraries (my PCIe NMVe slots are full of 512 GB 950 PRO).

I almost bought a pair of 512 GB 850 PRO but I have found this accurate bench of the 850 PRO (red) and the Extreme PRO (blue) reading speeds.

I heard somewhere that the most important bandwith for streaming libraries are between 4KB and 64KB.

BLUE : SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB - Marvell 9187 - SanDisk 2nd Gen 64Gbit 19nm MLC
RED : Samsung SSD 850 Pro 1TB - Samsung MEX - Samsung 86Gbit 32-layer 40nm MLC V-NAND






Link of the 2013 Bench :
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1242?vs=1252

There are also 2015, 512/480 benches but not so accurate.

In my country the Sandisk is less expensive and has also a 10 years warranty. So I would naturally select it but I am curious to know your advices.

Thanks


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## synthpunk (Nov 27, 2016)

I use this site as a guide both of them are listed there
http://www.hardware-revolution.com/best-sdd-solid-state-drive-november-2016/


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## rgames (Nov 27, 2016)

Ever since SSDs passed the 400 MB/s sequential read mark I haven't seen any indication that there's a difference for DAW use. I've used SSDs that bench between 400 and 1200 MB/s and they all perform about the same in terms of number of streaming voices. The bottleneck is not the read speed.

In other words, pretty much any SSD that will do 500 MB/s sequential (any transfer size) is as good as any other. I've seen some indication of a dependence on IOPS but it's small and, as far as I can tell, insignificant once you get past 90k IOPS or so.

From a practical standpoint, the difference between SSDs and HDDs is large, partly due to read speed but (my guess) moreso do to access time. From the same practical standpoint, the differences among different SSDs is really small.

So buy whatever is cheapest unless you can find a real-life benchmark that shows a difference. Then show me because I haven't seen it 

rgames


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## NYC Composer (Nov 27, 2016)

I disremember, Richard-did you test PCI-e as well as SATA?


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## rgames (Nov 27, 2016)

NYC Composer said:


> I disremember, Richard-did you test PCI-e as well as SATA?


Yes - post #11:

http://vi-control.net/community/threads/i7-6700k-slave-machine-sample-streaming-benchmarks.54126/

PCIe 4x NVME dropped load times a bit but otherwise showed no real advantage for streaming.

rgames


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## NYC Composer (Nov 28, 2016)

Thanks, Richard.


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## mac88104 (Nov 28, 2016)

Thanks for your answers, so I think I will consider the Samsung 750 EVO 500 GB model. Not as reliable as the PRO Series but I have backups for everything.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Nov 28, 2016)

My knee-jerk skepticism to benchmark tests like that says Richard is almost certainly right - not because the tests are false, but because they usually make an inconsequential difference in the real world.

What I can say is that, as I posted before, loading a QL Piano from a Mushkin 1TB SSD took 10 seconds on my SATA 2 internal bus, then it went down to 8 seconds on the OWC Accelsior SATA 3 PCI card I bought out of curiousity.


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## ZeroZero (Nov 28, 2016)

Have you considered an M-2 drive? They are much faster the samsung 960 is on its way at 3.5 gb top speed (about seven times faster) This comes in at about 500 uk for 1TB.


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## synthpunk (Nov 28, 2016)

You didn't read rgames post above about speeds and bottlenecks being relative right?


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## JohnG (Nov 28, 2016)

I would think the faster PCI lane would dramatically increase the available voices. I'm curious if anyone has actually tried testing that with a dense passage of music. I could have sworn I read a test that showed an enormous improvement from attaching the SSDs to a PCIe card's SATA III ports.


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## Baron Greuner (Nov 28, 2016)

I us 4 Sans Disk Extreme Pro 480s in a Black Magic Dock. They work well. The 10 year guarantee was also a factor.


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## mac88104 (Nov 29, 2016)

@ ZeroZero, in fact I already have 2x M.2 512 GB 950 PRO (the first one on my motherboard M.2 slot, the second one on connected through a PCIe adaptor). I haven't reach the system limit yet but I need more SSD space (thanks to the 180 GB of Berlin Brass...) and so I first try to install SATA drives instead of adding a slave because my current template loads and run without any problem for the moment.


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## mac88104 (Nov 29, 2016)

I first ordered yesterday 2x Samsung 850 EVO 512 GB, my ICY dock rack will still have 2 empty slots.


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## ZeroZero (Nov 29, 2016)

mac88104 said:


> @ ZeroZero, in fact I already have 2x M.2 512 GB 950 PRO (the first one on my motherboard M.2 slot, the second one on connected through a PCIe adaptor). I haven't reach the system limit yet but I need more SSD space (thanks to the 180 GB of Berlin Brass...) and so I first try to install SATA drives instead of adding a slave because my current template loads and run without any problem for the moment.



Interesting. I would be very interested in your experiences (as I shall take the plunge soon). Is one for OS (Win/Mac?), and the other for samples? What kind of real world subjective difference do they make? Did you also tweak header sizes?

Z


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## mac88104 (Nov 29, 2016)

I am on Windows 10 and I use Cubase PRO 8.5.

I currently have all my libraries on the 2x NVMe Samsung SSD 950 PRO 512 GB. I plan to equip with 4x 850 EVO 512 GB (firstly I will receive two of them this week) because my M.2 SSD are completely full.

My system in on a Samsung SSD 850 PRO 256GB (reliability for system) and my projects on a Samsung SSD 850 PRO 512GB (reliability for projects). This 2 SSD are reliable but I have everything on the cloud though.

I haven't tweaked anything on my SSD. The SSD I use for my projects has RAPID mode on in order to accelerate the movement when I save a project but I don't see any difference in fact. My current project takes 300 MB and it takes 30 seconds to save.

The fact is that it works well with the NVMe SSD but I don't know if it would be different with 2 SATA SSD.

Anyway I am going to fill my template during the next few days so I will see my system limit. For the moment, my template has about 250 instances/tracks (16 midi Kontakt channels) loaded but only 1/3 are totally or partially used.

I have no slave and I don't use VEPro for the moment. I am thinking to install VEPro only to manage little projects and gain time to load and save projects.

Could you tell me the advantage of tweaking header sizes, please ?

Thanks


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## ZeroZero (Nov 29, 2016)

As I understand things, (and I do tech only when forced), the header is the first part of each sample that is loaded into RAM. This is used whilst the rest is fetched. In some players you can set the overall header sizes.

Have you tried using disabled tracks in Cubase? Such an efficient and easy way to work.
I have over a thousand tracks here loaded into 6gb of my 32 gb RAM. Personally I don't think you need Vepro. I bought it, learn't it, and decided it was of no use to Cubase. The only possible exception is if your running slaves - Vepro works well over ethernet. Unless your a Hollywood King, I dont think there is a need for slaves anymore, the way things are so fast and musically less is more.

I am getting that, in summary there are marginal real benefits to having a Samsung Pro M-2 as opposed to an 8050 SSD?

Z


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## mac88104 (Nov 29, 2016)

Ah ok, I thought you were talking about tweaking the cylinder head sector of my SSD.

In Kontakt I tweak my preload buffer size near to the minimum, currently at 6 or 12 kb. For the moment I load all my tracks activated but yes, I plan to deactivate the ones I am sure I will barely use for a particular project. All my libraries are loaded from kontakt multis I have purged so they load faster but it takes a little time though.

On another thread I have posted that :
""
I use 2 Samsung PCIe/M.2 950 PRO 512 GB on a single PC. More than 700 tracks are streamed for the moment (Spitfire, OT, 8Dio, etc...) with 6kb preload size in Kontakt and no problem. Latency almost reaches 0, except if I use heavy plugins effects (I would only use later for mixing and mastering) but it is another story.

I bought 3 SSD's 750 EVO 256 GB last month but I am going to send them back to replace them with 2 * 500 GB. I was afraid to have too much patches on a single SSD but Blakus posts he uses 4 1 TB Samsung SSD with no problem, also on a single middle average old PC (no VEPRO), and he loads almost 220 kontakt instances in his main template, so...

I plan to have, in addition to my 2 Samsung 950 PROs, 4 or 6 (depending my future needs) SATA 500 GB Samsung 750 EVO in a near future. No raid 0, no VEPRO, I will just equivalently distribute my libraries on my SSD's and regularly purge my Kontakt patches. I also will avoid to exceed 75% of my SSD's room, and I plan to deactivate unused tracks if my machine begin to shows signs of weakness. I forgot to say that I also have 128 GB of RAM, so a good margin to increase the Kontakt preload size if necessary, regarding the fact that, in this power management strategy, my patches will be always purged at 95 % (deactivating tracks will be the last stand). Also forgot to mention that my CPU can be overclocked, if necessary, to 4.4 GHz without any problem (already tested) but it never exceeded 10-15 % charge load until now.
""


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## mac88104 (Nov 29, 2016)

ZeroZero said:


> I am getting that, in summary there are marginal real benefits to having a Samsung Pro M-2 as opposed to an 8050 SSD?



Maybe yes, rgames has already concluded that after proceeding tests. If I were you, I would order 850 SSD's on amazon, test them with a full workload and send them back in case of problem.


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## ZeroZero (Nov 29, 2016)

It's funny when you talk of "deactivating tracks will be the last stand". Why? it's only one click to get them back. I also use Visibility and hide things away disabled style. My template opens to a piano and an audio track testing 5.1 system. As it pleases me, I simply enable and unhide what I need, but there are a thousand or so instruments all ready to go.
Did you know that any project can behave like a track archive/ library now? This means you can have a grand template and if you want import as you wish.
Track archives have been around for a while, but there is now "Import track from project" function. This is on the file/import menu. What happens is you source a project, any project, click on it, then it reads the project and presents you with a list of tracks from which you can pick and choose. This makes everything portable in a flash. No need for Vepro again.
Conceivably, you could simply have some kind of master template, then a bare project with nothing loaded at all, then " Import from project" as you need. Working this way, your master template project has no RAM implications (as it is never loaded), and your current project simply copies as needed. It's really easy to do as well. 


Z


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## khollister (Nov 29, 2016)

If we set aside initial loading time on a new patch, increased SSD speed is useful for increasing voice count by reducing the overhead of fetching new samples from disk. This would intuitively correlate to small random reads at high queue depths. The issue is figuring out where the practical limit is - an M.2 PCIe SSD has significantly better performance, but may not translate to more voices because we are limited by some other factor, most likely the efficiency of the host application (VEP, Logic, Cubase, etc). 

Richard (rgames) is the only individual I have run across that has attempted to test this rather than rely on anecdotal evidence. My own opinion is that while it is easy to get caught up in idea of hosting your sample library with multiple PCIe SSD's, the current real world difficulties (limited PCIe lanes, capacity of m.2 drives, cost, potential thermal throttling due to placement and packaging, etc) don't make that all that practical unless your sample footprint is a lot smaller than mine. It might be worth doing in the case of the few libraries that are very large and have known performance issues (e.g. HWS Diamond), but I'm not convinced it is a big deal for most Kontakt libraries.


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## Noam Guterman (Nov 29, 2016)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/28/e8_on_cots_and_nvme/


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## mac88104 (Nov 29, 2016)

@ZeroZero Thanks, it seems to be very practical indeed. I will try that !


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## mac88104 (Dec 6, 2016)

Ok so I have tried to deactivate Instruments Tracks on my template and...it's a real mess. I use Kontakt. Each instrument track carry an instance of Kontakt using 16 patches (so 16 midi channels input per Kontakt instance). I have 16 cubase midi tracks connected to each Kontakt instance. And when I deactivate an instrument track, it loses the midi tracks connection when I reactivate it. The reactivated track is at the end of the pack and the midi track is found orphaned or assigned to another track.

I have red several threads on this problem. This Cubase bug is not fixed yet. It's almost inadmissible for a so-called PRO software. And I can't work around this problem using instruments racks instead of instruments tracks because of the 64 racks ceiling limitation of the "PRO" version. Moreover, I think remember that one can not deactivate an instrument rack...

So I continue to have my track instruments activated at any time and I pray for cubase 9 to solve this. Thanks anyway for the tip.


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## ZeroZero (Dec 6, 2016)

mac88104 said:


> Ok so I have tried to deactivate Instruments Tracks on my template and...it's a real mess. I use Kontakt. Each instrument track carry an instance of Kontakt using 16 patches (so 16 midi channels input per Kontakt instance). I have 16 cubase midi tracks connected to each Kontakt instance..



I am no tech, but I am using one instance of Kontakt for one instrument - on MIDI 1, per instrument track. This is working here. I can't say about your system though. I realise this would mean a rebuild of your template, why not rebuild after C9 brings it's cherries. 

Z


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## mac88104 (Dec 6, 2016)

Connecting only 1 midi track for one kontakt instance means to load about 1500 kontakt instances in my template because I need about 1500 tracks.
I guess my PC won't be ok with that but may be I am wrong.
I wait tomorrow for, I hope, something to solve this in C9.


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## ZeroZero (Dec 6, 2016)

It seemed counterintuitive to me too, but this seems to work - best wishes either way. I have 1280 tracks in 4.9 gig RAM, 13% CPU


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## mac88104 (Dec 6, 2016)

Ok the numbers speak for themselves. So in my case, assuming I only use Kontakt, I may have to load 1500 Kontakt instances (loaded in 1500 Instruments Tracks). Sorry to ask you confirmation, I prefer to be sure I fully understand (you already realized that english is not my native language) because it is not insignificant in terms of workload.


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