# Best SSD 4TB for sample libraries



## stigc56 (Apr 24, 2022)

Hi
I need more space, so I will go for another 4 TB SSD in my Black Magic Dock. Any recommendations?
Thanks!


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## Technostica (Apr 24, 2022)

What format drives does the Dock support as that is key?


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## charlieclouser (Apr 24, 2022)

In my BlackMagic MultiDock I use Samsung 2.5" SATA SSDs exclusively. 860 PRO for audio drives and EXS / Logic Sampler / WAV loops libraries (since that drive sees a ton of write activity), 860 EVO for Kontakt libraries (which sees a ton of reads but fewer writes), and 860 QVO for ROMpler libraries like Vienna / Sine / etc. (because QVO comes in an 8tb size and this one sees the fewest writes).

Haven't had any failures or other weirdness in many years. Once I was able to brick a 1tb 850 PRO when I killed the power while writing (d'oh!), but other than that it's been smooth sailing with Samsung for me.


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## tc9000 (Apr 24, 2022)

I use Samsung T5s (I have three now) connected via USB-3 and USB-C and find they have hit the perfect fast / cheap / reliable tradeoff so far.

(EDIT: I should emphasise - def not a pro, just an amateur.)


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## Justin L. Franks (Apr 24, 2022)

tc9000 said:


> I use Samsung T5s (I have three now) connected via USB-3 and USB-C and find they have hit the perfect fast / cheap / reliable tradeoff so far.
> 
> (EDIT: I should emphasise - def not a pro, just an amateur.)


T5's only go up to 2 TB, not 4 TB. Same with the newer T7.


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## R10k (Apr 24, 2022)

I just picked up a Samsung 870 QVO, 4tb…


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## colony nofi (Apr 25, 2022)

The QVO's are totally fine for sample libs that you are mainly reading. Great value, and you won't see any difference in speed compared to higher end drives when using them in the black magic dock. We have about 12 x 4TB QVO's in the docks in our studios and they've never skipped a beat. I've not used the 8TB QVO's but can't see a reason why they'd be any different. 
As it happens, I think (don't quote me on this) that we use a tonne of EVO's in our server for projects (post and music comp). They don't see much in terms of writes - and they saturate 2 x 10GBE without blinking. They'd make fine SSD's for samples.


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## Mr Greg G (Apr 25, 2022)

charlieclouser said:


> 860 EVO for Kontakt libraries (which sees a ton of reads but fewer writes), and 860 QVO for ROMpler libraries like Vienna / Sine / etc.


I don't understand the difference of treatment you make between Kontakt and ROMpler libs, why are Kt on EVO and others on QVO SSD? Do you make way more "writes" with Kt than with other players?


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## GtrString (Apr 25, 2022)

Samsung for Windows and WD for MAC


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## cedricm (Apr 25, 2022)

charlieclouser said:


> In my BlackMagic MultiDock I use Samsung 2.5" SATA SSDs exclusively. 860 PRO for audio drives and EXS / Logic Sampler / WAV loops libraries (since that drive sees a ton of write activity), 860 EVO for Kontakt libraries (which sees a ton of reads but fewer writes), and 860 QVO for ROMpler libraries like Vienna / Sine / etc. (because QVO comes in an 8tb size and this one sees the fewest writes).
> 
> Haven't had any failures or other weirdness in many years. Once I was able to brick a 1tb 850 PRO when I killed the power while writing (d'oh!), but other than that it's been smooth sailing with Samsung for me.


SATA isn't very speedy. 
Is it fast enough for you to stream samples or do you load them into memory?


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## Pictus (Apr 25, 2022)

I would not buy the 870 EVO





Careful: Samsung EVO 4TB SSD (high failure rates)


Hi, Just letting people know, be careful when your buying a large size SSD, seems Samsung (who also sell their chips to other manufacturers to use in their products) are doing sneaky things like using the good (nand?) chips for the early part of the storage, but the cheaper or even B grade...



vi-control.net


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## stigc56 (Apr 25, 2022)

Thanks. As long ad it’s safe with cheaper QVO, I go with that.


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## charlieclouser (Apr 26, 2022)

cedricm said:


> SATA isn't very speedy.
> Is it fast enough for you to stream samples or do you load them into memory?


SATA is plenty fast enough for streaming samples. Plenty. Never had any disc-related performance issues. The disc usage meters on both Logic and Kontakt barely register, even if I'm hammering away 16th notes across a dozen staccato strings libraries.


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## charlieclouser (Apr 26, 2022)

Mr Greg G said:


> I don't understand the difference of treatment you make between Kontakt and ROMpler libs, why are Kt on EVO and others on QVO SSD? Do you make way more "writes" with Kt than with other players?


The main reason I got a QVO for my ROMpler libraries was because it was the only model available in 8tb size, and I wanted to have all that stuff in one big volume for ease of backups and housekeeping. Plus those libraries see almost no write cycles once they've been installed.

My Kontakt volumes do see a medium level of writes. Between the constant cycle of updated versions of old libraries, the installation of new libraries, my obsessive renaming and re-organizing of the NKI files, my creation of new instruments from scratch, and my constant conversion of EXS / Logic Sampler based libraries in a mostly-futile attempt to maintain parity between the two formats.... there's a medium level of writes going on there. Maybe not enough to require Samsung PRO drives, but... Anyway, I had all four of those 4tb volumes configured before QVO drives even hit the streets. I'd love for it to be one 16tb volume (or two 8tb volumes) but that's just for housekeeping reasons, so not important enough to buy new drives just to be able to organize things differently.

As it stands it's a pretty clean setup, with each volume around 75% full:

BlackMagic MultiDock #1:

4tb Kontakt-A = drum kits, keys, metals, pianos, synths
4tb Kontakt-B = cinematic percussion and "full orchestra" libraries
4tb Kontakt-C = strings
4tb Kontakt-D = brass, woodwinds, choirs+voices

BlackMagic MultiDock #2:

4tb SampleDrive = EXS+Logic Sampler stuff and raw WAVs that I use in Ableton Live
8tb ROMpler Drive = content for Vienna, Sine, Spitfire Player, UVI, East-West Play+Opus, etc.

That leaves me two empty slots in the second MultiDock for a pair of 860 PRO 4tb project drives. I usually work from one and leave the second un-mounted until the end of each day when I shove it into its slot and synchronize it with the primary drive. I also synchronize projects to a pair of 16tb spinning drives in an OWC dual-drive "toaster style" dock for project backups + archives. That way if the MultiDock takes a crap and fries all of my SSDs at once I can rebuild from spinning drives and only be a day behind.

Of course all of the sample drives are synchronized to a bunch of spinning drives as well, whenever I make big changes to anything - usually once or twice a month. All of those spinning drives live in a pair of Pelican cases for quick grab-n-go evac in case of bug-out, so I always have five complete sets on hand in the building (my working set on SSD and a double set in each of the two Pelican cases) and then I exchange one Pelican case with a third double-duplicate set that lives in a safe deposit box at the bank down the hill and out of brush-fire range. I try to make the bank run once every month or two.


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## holywilly (Apr 26, 2022)

@charlieclouser 
What app are you using to monitor the health of ssd?


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## charlieclouser (Apr 26, 2022)

holywilly said:


> @charlieclouser
> What app are you using to monitor the health of ssd?


None.


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## carlc (Apr 26, 2022)

Justin L. Franks said:


> T5's only go up to 2 TB, not 4 TB. Same with the newer T7.


I thought this wouldn’t be an issue, but I have three T7 drives and find myself often moving content around to make things fit. Every time I move a library and have to relocate it in Native Access, EastWest Installer, etc. I wish I had a single large SSD. Don’t get me wrong, the performance is great, but Samsung should have a 4TB external drive offering by this point.


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## Justin L. Franks (Apr 26, 2022)

carlc said:


> Don’t get me wrong, the performance is great, but Samsung should have a 4TB external drive offering by this point.


It's especially surprising that they don't, since they already have 4 TB (and even 8 TB) internal SSD's out there.


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## pranic (Apr 26, 2022)

Happy user of 2x4TB QVO Samsung drives for samples. Backup to multiple spinning disks (16TB in a USB dock, and a btrfs array on another server with a boatload of 8TB SAS drives). 

I've never had a problem with any of my Samsung SSDs (knock on wood). Only one I've ever had failures with is a Crucial MX500 series 1TB SSD. It's cool to hear what people are doing in their own setups for storage, though.


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## Doppler (Apr 26, 2022)

Been using an 8TB QVO drive for all my Kontakt libraries for the past couple of months. Haven’t noticed any speed issues compared to my T5 drives while using it in a session loading libraries, but the transfer rates do drop to around 150 Mbps when transferring libraries to the drive after writing about 80GB of data.


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## cedricm (Apr 26, 2022)

charlieclouser said:


> SATA is plenty fast enough for streaming samples. Plenty. Never had any disc-related performance issues. The disc usage meters on both Logic and Kontakt barely register, even if I'm hammering away 16th notes across a dozen staccato strings libraries.


Great to know. I guess I could have spared the expense of NVme PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Oh well, better safe than sorry.


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## Zedcars (Apr 27, 2022)

This Sandisk Extreme Pro v2 SSD 4TB looks pretty good:



https://www.westerndigital.com/en-gb/products/portable-drives/sandisk-extreme-pro-usb-3-2-ssd#SDSSDE81-4T00-G25



You need a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2x2 port or Thunderbolt 4 port to take advantage of its top speeds though.

I don’t own one but currently researching whether it’s a good fit for my needs or whether there is a better alternative.


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## Justin L. Franks (Apr 27, 2022)

Doppler said:


> Been using an 8TB QVO drive for all my Kontakt libraries for the past couple of months. Haven’t noticed any speed issues compared to my T5 drives while using it in a session loading libraries, but the transfer rates do drop to around 150 Mbps when transferring libraries to the drive after writing about 80GB of data.


The 8 TB QVO drives use up to 78 GB as SLC write cache, which is much faster. If you are writing less than that, you'll get that fast speed, and it will then be transferred in the background to the "main" QLC portion of the drive. Go over that, and it fills up the write cache, and needs to start writing directly to the much slower QLC.


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## Doppler (Apr 27, 2022)

Justin L. Franks said:


> The 8 TB QVO drives use up to 78 GB as SLC write cache, which is much faster. If you are writing less than that, you'll get that fast speed, and it will then be transferred in the background to the "main" QLC portion of the drive. Go over that, and it fills up the write cache, and needs to start writing directly to the much slower QLC.


Yep, I read about this before picking up the drive. Since, once I have all my libraries in place I rarely need to write to the drive, I decided to go with QVO for the 8TB size and price difference. Have had no issues with OPUS and the Kontakt libraries I have on it.


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## MonsieurBasile (Apr 30, 2022)

I’ve got a question about SSDs, specifically the Samsung T7 2TB.

I’m about to be making a SSD purchase and the Samsung T7 2TB caught my eye on being reliable, safe, and durable (the bulkier one).

But I’ve ran into some tech information that left my small brain in a pickle. I’m running everything on a 2015 MacBook Pro with 2 USB 3.0 ports. The T7 claims up to 1k in speeds or whatever with a USB 3.2 connection.

First question is, will by USB 3.0 port still work and run everything on the USB 3.2 drive. Second question, if it does and is downgrading or whatever to a 3.0 USB port, am I losing a lot of speed, thus not justifying purchasing something more expensive like that for “faster speeds” if all I have are USB 3.0 ports?


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## R10k (May 1, 2022)

MonsieurBasile said:


> First question is, will by USB 3.0 port still work and run everything on the USB 3.2 drive. Second question, if it does and is downgrading or whatever to a 3.0 USB port, am I losing a lot of speed, thus not justifying purchasing something more expensive like that for “faster speeds” if all I have are USB 3.0 ports?


Everything will work fine, but you'll probably get half the potential speed. Those speeds should be just fine for doing pretty much anything, however. What would you be doing off the drive?

Cost wise, it's an expensive 2tb drive at those speeds. For the same money I bought a 4tb SSD and threw it in a dirt cheap caddy.

It's also worth knowing that the T7 drive on newer Macs (M1) are often limited because of the USB ports, which aren't dual lane (I believe). So, to get 1-2k you need to go through either thunderbolt or use a thunderbolt hub with an nvme ssd. Thunderbolt isn't cheap (whatever way you slice it) and drives at those speeds get hot.

What I'm trying to say is - a T7 isn't cheap, but if you don't know how to roll your own, it'll still be a good drive at lower speeds, depending on what you need.


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## micrologus (May 1, 2022)

I use Samsung T3, T5 and T7 SSD for samples and they work very well. I just bought the SanDisk Extreme (not pro) with 4TB, to reduce the number of SSD connected to my iMac. The USB cable is ridiculously short (10 cm = 3.93 inches).


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## MonsieurBasile (May 1, 2022)

R10k said:


> Everything will work fine, but you'll probably get half the potential speed. Those speeds should be just fine for doing pretty much anything, however. What would you be doing off the drive?
> 
> Cost wise, it's an expensive 2tb drive at those speeds. For the same money I bought a 4tb SSD and threw it in a dirt cheap caddy.
> 
> ...


Thanks for the great info! When you say roll your own, I don’t know what you mean by that, but I assume it’s like assembling your own?

Before I was using a Western Digital 2TB HDD. It actually seemingly worked just fine for me. Sure certain things like a string library took a long time to load, but I thought that was just how it was, and also mainly my computer that made it take longer.

I put all my VSTs on the drive, whether there synths, or full orchestra libraries of strings, brass, etc.

Just trying to look for the most bang for my buck while trying to get the most out of my USB 3.0 and/or thunderbolt hubs on laptop.


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## Technostica (May 1, 2022)

MonsieurBasile said:


> I’ve got a question about SSDs, specifically the Samsung T7 2TB.
> 
> First question is, will by USB 3.0 port still work and run everything on the USB 3.2 drive. Second question, if it does and is downgrading or whatever to a 3.0 USB port, am I losing a lot of speed, thus not justifying purchasing something more expensive like that for “faster speeds” if all I have are USB 3.0 ports?


The drive will be bottlenecked by USB 3.0 for sequential reads/writes, but a lot of sample libraries use loads of small files which requires random access.
In this scenario USB 3.0 is not a bottleneck as random throughput will be under 200MB/s.
That's my understanding and the same goes when comparing PCIe 3 v PCIe 4 SSDs.
I've seen plenty of PCIe 3 SSDs giving better random read performance than even decent PCIe 4 drives.


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## R10k (May 1, 2022)

MonsieurBasile said:


> Thanks for the great info! When you say roll your own, I don’t know what you mean by that, but I assume it’s like assembling your own?
> 
> Before I was using a Western Digital 2TB HDD. It actually seemingly worked just fine for me. Sure certain things like a string library took a long time to load, but I thought that was just how it was, and also mainly my computer that made it take longer.
> 
> ...


Yeah, roll your own means put an ssd in a caddy 😊

Hard drives can work, but I hit a few quirks trying to use a certain sample library off one. So, an ssd (pretty much any one!) has worked well for me.


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## agarner32 (Nov 26, 2022)

Can anyone comment on this 4TB SDD to consolidate my 4 1 TB SSD drives?

Sandisk Extreme


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## ChristianM (Nov 26, 2022)

Yo have this :








OWC Accelsior 8M2 - World’s Fastest & Highest Capacity PCIe SSD


The fastest drive available for 2019-current Mac Pro, Windows, or Linux computers with up to 8 SSD storage capacity performing at up to 26,926 MB/s speeds.




eshop.macsales.com


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## micrologus (Nov 26, 2022)

agarner32 said:


> Can anyone comment on this 4TB SDD to consolidate my 4 1 TB SSD drives?
> 
> Sandisk Extreme


I bought it to replace my two Samsung T5, it works fine.


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## agarner32 (Nov 26, 2022)

ChristianM said:


> Yo have this :
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I have an iMac so that wouldn't work. Thanks for the reply.


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## agarner32 (Nov 26, 2022)

micrologus said:


> I bought it to replace my two Samsung T5, it works fine.


That's what I wanted to hear. Thanks for the endorsement.


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## YuyaoSG (Nov 26, 2022)

WD_850x 4T 7300/S $374 What are you waiting for ? LOL


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## agarner32 (Nov 26, 2022)

YuyaoSG said:


> WD_850x 4T 7300/S $374 What are you waiting for ? LOL


I need external for my iMac which means either a SATA with an enclosure or one that's already external.


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## Justin L. Franks (Nov 26, 2022)

agarner32 said:


> I need external for my iMac which means either a SATA with an enclosure or one that's already external.


https://www.newegg.com/crucial-x6-4tb/p/N82E16820156278?Item=N82E16820156278 ($260)

or

 ($300, faster. Ignore the $379.99 price in the thumbnail, it's $299.99)


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## agarner32 (Nov 26, 2022)

Justin L. Franks said:


> https://www.newegg.com/crucial-x6-4tb/p/N82E16820156278?Item=N82E16820156278 ($260)
> 
> or
> 
> ($300, faster. Ignore the $379.99 price in the thumbnail, it's $299.99)



Well then that settles it. Thanks for the link. That is a great price.


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