# Audio Dropouts with new SSD (WD My Passport 2 TB)



## mussnig (Jan 24, 2021)

Hey,

I've been using a SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD, 1 TB (max. read speed 550 MB/s, 2018 model) for my samples (mostly Kontakt). All this time, I never had a problem with it. However, it is filling up and so I decided to get a 2 TB drive.

After some browsing, I chose a WD My Passport 2 TB (max. read speed 1050 MB/s). I got it yesterday and did some initial tests (copying some files from the local NVMe) - seems to really be much faster than the SanDisk, especially when I directly connect it via Thunderbolt. I formatted it to NTFS (instead of exFAT), transferred all my libraries onto the new drive and gave it the same letter (in Windows) as the previous drive had, so all the paths would stay the same.

However, today I wanted to continue working on a project and suddenly noticed all kinds of Audio dropouts that haven't been there before. At first, I thought it might be the Buffer Size of my Audio Interface and increased it - but it didn't help. When I opened up Kontakt, I saw that sometimes the disk status becomes red for a fracture of a second, but I don't really see the percentage going up. Anyways, even after increasing the preload buffer size in Kontakt (from 30 kB to 70 kB) it didn't improve a lot (maybe a bit, but I was still getting dropouts regularly).

So I closed the project, swapped the drives (so I am using the old one) and opened up again - no dropouts. Hence, I am very much convinced that this is an issue of my new harddrive. Is there any setting that I might need to change that could help? Or is it simply the case, that certain drives can't handle such situations so well?

I would be grateful for any help on this!


----------



## BlakStatus (Jan 24, 2021)

I'm not sure if this will help you but about 2 months ago or so, I bought the WD Blue 4TB SSD and put it in an USB-C enclosure. It was working fine for a week and then something happened to where it got corrupted. All data was gone and I had to format again. I thought maybe I or Windows (since it did a chkdsk on a reboot) had done something. After I formatted and put my libraries on the drive again, I was more aware this time. I also made sure I ejected properly from Windows before disconnecting the cable. After another week or so, it did it again. So I returned the drive to Amazon and purchased the 4TB Samsung SSD instead. I haven't had a problem since.


----------



## mussnig (Jan 24, 2021)

BlakStatus said:


> I'm not sure if this will help you but about 2 months ago or so, I bought the WD Blue 4TB SSD and put it in an USB-C enclosure. It was working fine for a week and then something happened to where it got corrupted. All data was gone and I had to format again. I thought maybe I or Windows (since it did a chkdsk on a reboot) had done something. After I formatted and put my libraries on the drive again, I was more aware this time. I also made sure I ejected properly from Windows before disconnecting the cable. After another week or so, it did it again. So I returned the drive to Amazon and purchased the 4TB Samsung SSD instead. I haven't had a problem since.


Thank you for the quick reply. But I am usually very cautious (e.g., when Windows doesn't let me disconnect the drive, I shut down Windows and only when all power is gone, I unplug the drive). Also, I only got it yesterday, copied my samples and wanted to really use if for the first time today.

So I am not sure if there are any settings I could further optimize ... I also turned off Windows Realtime Scan, so this shouldn't cause my issues. If I don't find any solution within a week, I will probably have to return the drive ...


----------



## mussnig (Jan 25, 2021)

UPDATE: So I did run some tests/checks and the disks performance seems to me more than good enough for running samples from it (basically the performance for everything with 64 kB and more is about twice as good as my SanDisk - below 64 kB it's roughly the same). However, I noticed in CrystalDiskInfo that the drive has been turned on 143 times within 5 hours. Obviously, I didn't check the counter when I got it, but I would estimate that I had it running for 5 hours and I also didn't have the impression that anyone has used the drive before. As a comparison, my SanDisk drive has a runtime of 1008 hours and the power on count is at 257.

So what I think happens is that the drive temporarily shuts down every now and then and that it then won't provide samples fast enough, once it needs to. However, when audio dropouts happen during playback in the DAW (and I now have the impression that in those cases only the pre-load buffer is played back) and I let it play back again from the beginning, it sometimes doesn't help. So I guess just Kontakt alone (without any Kontakt GUI open) isn't able to bring the drive back from sleep. Maybe this has also something to do with me using Ableton - I've read somewhere in the Beta forum that for some reason plugins run better in Ableton when their GUI is open, because of some weird way things are implemented. So the thing is, once the disk seems to realize it is needed, it wakes up and performs as expected (without any dropouts) - at least this is my impression.

I also noticed that sometimes when I open up a new instance of Kontakt and I expand a library (from the panel on the left), it freezes for a moment. This fits with the behavior described above, because the folder structure in Kontakt is the real folder structure on the disk and if the disk is asleep, it needs a moment to wake up.

Anyways, I already turned off all things in Windows that could possibly shut down the drive (e.g. in the device manager I unchecked that Windows may turn off USB and Thunderbolt devices). I also installed the WD Utilities software and it also shows me that the auto sleep function of the drive is turned off (however, for some strange reasons I am also not able to turn it on).

So can it be that the disks internal controller causes these shutdowns and that there is no way to turn it off?


----------



## fregtheeg (Feb 6, 2021)

Made an account because I'm having the same problem with the Sandisk Extreme Portable (which internally has the same WD NVME drive and probably the same controller as well). After about a minute of idling, loading samples from disk from Kontakt causes huge dropouts, and Task Manager reports 100% usage despite also reporting 0 MB/s read and write time. I've also experimented with trying to disable USB selective suspend, power saving, etc. The drive behaves this way when connected to my XPS 15 7950 via USB C or standard USB 3.1 cables. Sending it back, and now I know not to go with the WD Passport. Maybe the 1,000 MBps read time isn't worth it, because I've had no problems with the 550 MBps SATA SSD it was supposed to replace. Have you found any resolution yet?


----------



## mussnig (Feb 6, 2021)

Strange, my SanDisk always worked perfectly fine, although I had the version with only 550 MB/s.
I don't really know - at some point the WD just worked and I don't know why (I for sure didn't change anything because I already tried everything I could think of). I don't even know why I tried to use it again but suddenly it just worked. I haven't used it too extensively since then though, probably 5-10 hours. I think I still had dropouts once or twice, but nothing to make it unusable. I also checked with CrystalDiskInfo a couple of times and the turn on counter seems to behave as expected (so it's not turning itself off when it shouldn't).

The only thing that could have changed would be a Windows Update - but that's a bit strange, since I also have another 2 TB external NVME (I got it last summer) which usually works fine (although I had other problems with that one: occasionally the cable doesn't seem to be plugged in right and then it's not working with full speed).


----------



## rgames (Feb 6, 2021)

One thing that could cause the behavior you describe is Windows Defender. You need to exclude all of your sample drives from the defender scans or sample streaming performance might suffer. If the old drive was excluded and the new one is not then that could explain the behavior.

If that's not it then it's probably something to do with the controller on the WD vs. the Sandisk. That could be fixed with a driver update. I had that experience with an NVMe drive a number of years ago - lots of streaming dropouts despite great benchmarks. It was finally fixed with a BIOS update. However, remember that the problems we face in the sample streaming world rarely affect 99% of other users, so those bug fixes tend not to be high on the priority list. So I'd think strongly about returning the drive rather than hoping for a driver fix.

It's hard to draw real conclusions on sample streaming performance from disk read benchmarks. If they show a problem then you probably have a problem but if they show good read performance you might still have some other problem that's not captured in the benchmark (as you've demonstrated). It's kind of like a test for Covid-19: just because the test is negative doesn't mean you're not sick with something else.

rgames


----------



## mussnig (Feb 6, 2021)

rgames said:


> One thing that could cause the behavior you describe is Windows Defender. You need to exclude all of your sample drives from the defender scans or sample streaming performance might suffer. If the old drive was excluded and the new one is not then that could explain the behavior.


Did you mean me or @fregtheeg? In any case, thank you but that's one of the first things I did (I also mentioned it in a post above).


----------



## el-bo (Feb 6, 2021)

This was happening to me, yesterday. Tundra low strings kept cutting off after a few seconds. I also noticed when it happened that the disk usage would flash read and drop to zero. I solved the issue by reducing the slider to 6kb, I think (Sorry! Not at my 'puter) from a much higher number (not sure why it was so high), and that solved it.


----------



## Publius (Feb 6, 2021)

What I am reading looks like power management could be shutting it down. I also suggest thinking about the drive being defective. Also, drives can have cache that boosts performance till it fills up. I had an intermittent problem with an external cd drive that needed more power than the usb could give, go it kept shutting down and coming on.


----------



## mussnig (Feb 6, 2021)

Publius said:


> What I am reading looks like power management could be shutting it down. I also suggest thinking about the drive being defective. Also, drives can have cache that boosts performance till it fills up. I had an intermittent problem with an external cd drive that needed more power than the usb could give, go it kept shutting down and coming on.


Yes, I can confirm, I also had such a problem once although the hub should have provided more than enough energy. This was on my Surface Pro 4 (which only has 1 USB Port) and it was then impossible for me to directly move data from one drive to another one. 

But here in this case the drive is directly connected to my USB-C port. Obviously, I also tried other cables.

So again, the drive just suddenly worked as expected and I don't know why. The only thing that comes to my mind is that perhaps some changes that I made in the Windows Settings/Drivers only came into effect after a reboot. I usually always did reboot after changing various settings but maybe I forgot it once (I don't know anymore).

One other explanation might be the Chipset of the Laptop itself. I have the possibility to choose between two different energy modes for the CPU. Since I also use this laptop for work (which is usually not CPU heavy), I often switch between those two settings because they will result in different behavior with respect to fan activity. Anyways, whenever I switch the energy mode, it might happen during the next 1-3 reboots that suddenly the USB-C port doesn't work, which can only be solved by rebooting again (the weirdest thing to me is that this does not necessarily happen at the first reboot after switching the setting). So maybe this weird power management bug will also have consequences for certain hard drives (but not for others) even when the port seems to work fine. Maybe it also depends on how much power the drive needs (maybe my other drives need a little bit less, which perhaps makes a difference here).


----------



## markleake (Feb 6, 2021)

I had similar issues, solved by going back to using Samsung SSDs. T5 and T7 have proved reliable for me.

There are a number of things to look to fix, before you take a drive back:

- all your sample foldes/drives need to be excluded in Windows Defender
- on Windows you must use NTFS drive formatting - anything else can cause this kind of issue, for VSL instruments in particular (other formats can peform far worse for samples or be incompatible with how the VI player accesses the disk)
- turn off all legacy bios USB compatibility
- turn off all auto sleep settings for USB


----------



## mussnig (Apr 30, 2021)

Just wanted to give an update for anyone who is experiencing similar issues or is interested: The drive runs perfeclty fine as long as "WD Drive Manager" (a background service in Windows) is running. As soon as I turn it off, I get dropouts. Apparently the service is preventing the drive from using some unreasonable auto sleep behavior.


----------

