# External SSD library acting weird



## hibhardwaj (Jan 3, 2019)

I am trying to use an external SSD to hold all my sound libraries. In the past, I have used a regular hard drive and it has worked fine, but with growing size of libraries I thought of moving to SSD. When I moved my libraries (specifically Cinematic Strings) from regular to SSD (both external), there were lot of system overload messages and the heavier libraries like CSS were unplayable. When I moved the library address back to the regular hard drive, everything was normal. 

Now this seems counter intuitive that a regular hard drive is functioning better than a SSD. I sure am missing something; can somebody help me figure out what exactly I am missing.

Let me know if you would like to get some more information about my setup. 

Thanks,
~Himanshu


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## jbuhler (Jan 3, 2019)

hibhardwaj said:


> I am trying to use an external SSD to hold all my sound libraries. In the past, I have used a regular hard drive and it has worked fine, but with growing size of libraries I thought of moving to SSD. When I moved my libraries (specifically Cinematic Strings) from regular to SSD (both external), there were lot of system overload messages and the heavier libraries like CSS were unplayable. When I moved the library address back to the regular hard drive, everything was normal.
> 
> Now this seems counter intuitive that a regular hard drive is functioning better than a SSD. I sure am missing something; can somebody help me figure out what exactly I am missing.
> 
> ...


How is your SSD connected to your computer?


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## dflood (Jan 3, 2019)

Is your ‘regular’ spinning drive external or internal?


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## hibhardwaj (Jan 3, 2019)

jbuhler said:


> How is your SSD connected to your computer?


Its connected through the USB C to USB cable.


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## hibhardwaj (Jan 3, 2019)

dflood said:


> Is your ‘regular’ spinning drive external or internal?


Its the regular “external” drive.


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## jbuhler (Jan 3, 2019)

hibhardwaj said:


> Its connected through the USB C to USB cable.


Not sure how this works with USB C, but if the SSD is not in a USB C enclosure, it’s possible it’s not running at USB C speeds. If for some reason it was being deprecated to USB 2, for instance, you might get this kind of problem.


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## dflood (Jan 3, 2019)

It does seem weird that an identically connected SSD would seem to be slower. There are some free test utilities for both Macs and PC’s for benchmarking disk speeds that you could try. You mention that you are using a USB-C to USB-? cable. What type of USB does your machine support and what do the drives support? I realize this doesn’t explain why a similarly connected spinning drive would appear to perform better than an SSD but your maximum throughput will be limited by the slowest part of the link.

Maybe if you tell us more about your computer, your DAW, and the drives involved, someone here may have some idea of what could be happening.


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## ReelToLogic (Jan 3, 2019)

hibhardwaj said:


> I am trying to use an external SSD to hold all my sound libraries. In the past, I have used a regular hard drive and it has worked fine, but with growing size of libraries I thought of moving to SSD. When I moved my libraries (specifically Cinematic Strings) from regular to SSD (both external), there were lot of system overload messages and the heavier libraries like CSS were unplayable. When I moved the library address back to the regular hard drive, everything was normal.
> 
> Now this seems counter intuitive that a regular hard drive is functioning better than a SSD. I sure am missing something; can somebody help me figure out what exactly I am missing.
> 
> ...


Are you using a Mac or a PC? I have have a Mac and had the same issue when I first purchased an SSD (my external HD worked better than my SSD), but I realized that my external SSD was formatted as exFAT (for Mac/PC compatibility). After I reformatted it as Mac OS Extended Journaled, all was good.


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## hibhardwaj (Jan 3, 2019)

ReelToLogic said:


> Are you using a Mac or a PC? I have have a Mac and had the same issue when I first purchased an SSD (my external HD worked better than my SSD), but I realized that my external SSD was formatted as exFAT (for Mac/PC compatibility). After I reformatted it as Mac OS Journaled, all was good.


Yes I am on a Mac; let me try that.


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## storyteller (Jan 3, 2019)

hibhardwaj said:


> Yes I am on a Mac; let me try that.


Try Blackmagic Speed Test utility to check the hard drive speed. If it is external, you need to make sure your enclose is "Optimized for SSD, Supports UASP SATA III." That is generally how they are labeled on Amazon. A lot of enclosures say they are USB3, but do not work to the official standards causing SSDs to not perform correctly. Have no fear. $8.99 gets you a shiny new enclosure on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Tool-free-Enclosure-Optimized-EC-UASP/dp/B00OJ3UJ2S?psc=1&SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&tag=duckduckgo-d-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00OJ3UJ2S (Here's one) I use successfully.

As the other posters have stated, make sure it is formatted appropriately too. You might as well go ahead and use APFS as the file system format if you are using High Sierra or Mojave. That's where everything is headed anyway.

Last thought - make sure you have your Kontakt settings optimized for SSDs. Basically drop the cache to the lowest setting (6kb). You may need to raise it marginally based on your project, but it should work just fine at 6kb.


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## jcrosby (Jan 3, 2019)

Cable / connection type is everything. It’s like Ethernet, audio, anything that uses a cable... If you’re connected usb C to usb A you’re only going to get usb A speeds... 

format also does play a role, at least on Mac for sure... first thing I do with any generic external drive is reformat it... exFat is fine for thumb drives and media I share with people on windows, anything else external gets hfs + by default.


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## Kony (Jan 3, 2019)

hibhardwaj said:


> I am trying to use an external SSD to hold all my sound libraries. In the past, I have used a regular hard drive and it has worked fine, but with growing size of libraries I thought of moving to SSD. When I moved my libraries (specifically Cinematic Strings) from regular to SSD (both external), there were lot of system overload messages and the heavier libraries like CSS were unplayable. When I moved the library address back to the regular hard drive, everything was normal.
> 
> Now this seems counter intuitive that a regular hard drive is functioning better than a SSD. I sure am missing something; can somebody help me figure out what exactly I am missing.
> 
> ...


Have you done a batch re-save in Kontakt?


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## hibhardwaj (Jan 6, 2019)

ReelToLogic said:


> Are you using a Mac or a PC? I have have a Mac and had the same issue when I first purchased an SSD (my external HD worked better than my SSD), but I realized that my external SSD was formatted as exFAT (for Mac/PC compatibility). After I reformatted it as Mac OS Journaled, all was good.


That was spot on! I did that and it made life so good again  
Thank you so much.


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## SonsofRest (Jan 18, 2019)

I'm a bit late to this thread, which is a little embarrassing for my first post here, but wanted to add something. I know your problem is already solved, but there's another factor which can have a significant effect on SSD performance with sample libraries.

As an SSD gets fuller, it starts to run slower (I didn't believe this until I tested it myself). I had an SSD which was about 95% full, and had constant dropouts of audio, with Kontakt's disk usage meter overloading. It was particularly bad with some of the legato patches from Spitfire string libraries. Once I moved some libraries to another drive to free up some space, the problem immediately disappeared. For me, 70% seems like the magic number, so on a 1TB SSD I try not to go past 700GB.

It was really frustrating trying to trouble-shoot this, so hopefully this might help someone with the same problem who finds this thread in the future!


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## jbuhler (Jan 18, 2019)

SonsofRest said:


> I'm a bit late to this thread, which is a little embarrassing for my first post here, but wanted to add something. I know your problem is already solved, but there's another factor which can have a significant effect on SSD performance with sample libraries.
> 
> As an SSD gets fuller, it starts to run slower (I didn't believe this until I tested it myself). I had an SSD which was about 95% full, and had constant dropouts of audio, with Kontakt's disk usage meter overloading. It was particularly bad with some of the legato patches from Spitfire string libraries. Once I moved some libraries to another drive to free up some space, the problem immediately disappeared. For me, 70% seems like the magic number, so on a 1TB SSD I try not to go past 700GB.
> 
> It was really frustrating trying to trouble-shoot this, so hopefully this might help someone with the same problem who finds this thread in the future!


Were you getting any signs of problems besides the dropouts?

Another possibility is that you were streaming too many samples off the same disk and so were running up against the limitations of the port. Moving the library put some of that to another port. 

I have had some issues with SF legato patches (especially the total performance patch in the solo strings) and that problem requires raising the DFD buffer. And in SCS the performance legato patches for second violins and violas often just misbehave, including dropouts, substitution of portamento for fingered or bowed legato (and vice versa) despite velocities. This is on a disk well below 50% full. I mean it's great that moving the library to another disk solved the problem for you, and for folks having trouble it's definitely worth trying. But I think there are some deeper issues with some of those SF legato patches as well.


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## SonsofRest (Jan 18, 2019)

jbuhler said:


> Were you getting any signs of problems besides the dropouts?
> 
> Another possibility is that you were streaming too many samples off the same disk and so were running up against the limitations of the port. Moving the library put some of that to another port.
> 
> I have had some issues with SF legato patches (especially the total performance patch in the solo strings) and that problem requires raising the DFD buffer. And in SCS the performance legato patches for second violins and violas often just misbehave, including dropouts, substitution of portamento for fingered or bowed legato (and vice versa) despite velocities. This is on a disk well below 50% full. I mean it's great that moving the library to another disk solved the problem for you, and for folks having trouble it's definitely worth trying. But I think there are some deeper issues with some of those SF legato patches as well.



I had considered that maybe I was pulling too much from that disk, and so I made a clean project and loaded only a performance legato (SCS Celli), but had the same dropouts.

Now, raising the DFD buffer, that's something I haven't looked at, so thank you for that. I'm going to try that tonight and see what kind of results I get.

Thanks!


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## jbuhler (Jan 18, 2019)

SonsofRest said:


> I had considered that maybe I was pulling too much from that disk, and so I made a clean project and loaded only a performance legato (SCS Celli), but had the same dropouts.
> 
> Now, raising the DFD buffer, that's something I haven't looked at, so thank you for that. I'm going to try that tonight and see what kind of results I get.
> 
> Thanks!


In addition to DFD, to solve one problem that was manifesting as a CPU spike from a Spitfire legato I had to raise the buffer on the audio interface. It was quite peculiar because there was nothing unusual going on at that moment, it was not especially busy or anything, I do similar things elsewhere in the piece without incident, but I could reproduce it reliably at that moment in the piece but not elsewhere. The only thing that fixed it was raising the buffer on the audio interface.


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## Cinebient (Jan 18, 2019)

Also late to this thread but i had the same trouble which was also solved after i format to APFS (but Mac OS Journaled works too but APFS seems even faster).
I still had some trouble with some Kontakt libraries hanging and even freeze to load any new snapshots etc. Especially The Orchestra gave me headache here.
Then i realized i had Logic set to 1024 sample buffer and when i put it to 512 (or staying at 1024 but using 96Khz instead of 44.1 or 48 to cut the latency) everything worked fine.
It seems that some libraries really do not work great with higher latency.
So staying with 512 (or less) works almost great for everything.
I put now all my libraries and all the Logic content into a Samsung T5 which is connected via usb-c to
usb-a to my macbook from 2013 and it is as fast (or almost) as the internal SSD. I also use a T3 (which is almost as good as the T5) and a T1 which is a bit slower.
I even thought about to use a Thunderbolt 3 SSD like the Samsung X5 but it really is not needed for sample libraries since i do not care if i wait 2 seconds or 3 or so.
I really love these small SSDs and hope next time we could get also 4 or 8TB with the same small size and weight.


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## hibhardwaj (Jan 18, 2019)

SonsofRest said:


> I'm a bit late to this thread, which is a little embarrassing for my first post here, but wanted to add something. I know your problem is already solved, but there's another factor which can have a significant effect on SSD performance with sample libraries.
> 
> As an SSD gets fuller, it starts to run slower (I didn't believe this until I tested it myself). I had an SSD which was about 95% full, and had constant dropouts of audio, with Kontakt's disk usage meter overloading. It was particularly bad with some of the legato patches from Spitfire string libraries. Once I moved some libraries to another drive to free up some space, the problem immediately disappeared. For me, 70% seems like the magic number, so on a 1TB SSD I try not to go past 700GB.
> 
> It was really frustrating trying to trouble-shoot this, so hopefully this might help someone with the same problem who finds this thread in the future!


Very


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## hibhardwaj (Jan 18, 2019)

This is very helpful advice! Thanks for taking time.


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## tav.one (Jan 19, 2019)

Extra thanks to this thread, I had Samsung T5 External SSD since 2 months and thought that its Kontakt which is not making best use of SSDs well. I could not bounce any track in offline mode, bounce in place wasn't working either.
Reformatting it was like rebirth, it went from USB 2 performance to...well...SSD performance. I had no idea formatting it was more important than buying it, this should be a sticky for first time buyers, thank you so much.
I formatted to APFS from Pre-formatted Ex-Fat (I read SSD + APFS = Made for each other)


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## Jeremy Spencer (Jan 21, 2019)

hibhardwaj said:


> When I moved my libraries (specifically Cinematic Strings) from regular to SSD (both external), there were lot of system overload messages and the heavier libraries like CSS were unplayable



Jeez, I wondered about this. CS2 is the only library that loaded VERY slow from my Samsung T5 (connected to USB3 on my MB Pro). I had to put it on the Lacie 7200rpm in order to load "normally".


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