# PCIe 3.0 vs PCI 4.0 NVMe SSDs for orchestral libraries



## jvms (May 9, 2021)

So I started building a PC and bought an I7 10700K and a Gigabyte Z490 Vision D with 64gb of RAM at 3200mhz. The main purpose is to write orchestral music with a shit ton of Kontakt instances running Spitfire and Orchestral Tools samples, among other libraries. Apparently, I fucked up really bad on my research and did not realize PCIe 4.0 was already available and I'm feeling so stupid.

I have never stored my samples in something other than my Crucial BX500 2TB, so I have no experience with NVMe drives at all. Do you guys think it's worth trying to return my stuff and get a PC that can handle PCIe 4.0? Will the read times make a difference at all in loading time, stability and and amount of tracks my DAW can handle? Any other info I need on the matter?

Thanks a lot for the attention!


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## d.healey (May 9, 2021)

Stick with PCI 3.0. You won't notice any difference and your drive won't run as hot.


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## colony nofi (May 12, 2021)

I second David. Kontakt is not fast in loading at the best of times. Some have seen ok performance increases (for loading) using NVME, but difference between them and standard SATA SSD's is less than one would think. Going up to PCIE 4 is not something that I could see giving that much of a real world boost to loading times / number of voices. Certainly won't effect stability.

There's precious little significant testing that I've seen for what it means for running tonnes and tonnes of voices. I've run some of my own tests - and as it happens, just got in a 8TB Sabrent Rocket in a thunderbolt 3 enclosure to test today. Its only PCIE 3.0, but I should be able to compare it to internal NVME (again, I'm only on PCIE 3.0) as well as USB 3.2 (I think I have a USB NVME enclosure somewhere) and then other drives of different types (Glyph Raid, T5's, Bog standard Samsung 860 EVO's and 870QVO's in a blackmagic dock. It might take me a while to get through it all, but I hope at some stage soon to have some decent test results to share. I'm just at the stage where I've finished creating a bunch of customised kontakt instruments designed to highlight differences. (so, running everything from RAM vs tiny pre-load, large sample sets, having each instrument have its own set of samples so kontakt doesn't save RAM etc etc)

And having the DAW add voices in pre-determined numbers every second to make it easy to identify when things fall over.


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## Dracarys (Dec 30, 2021)

colony nofi said:


> I second David. Kontakt is not fast in loading at the best of times. Some have seen ok performance increases (for loading) using NVME, but difference between them and standard SATA SSD's is less than one would think. Going up to PCIE 4 is not something that I could see giving that much of a real world boost to loading times / number of voices. Certainly won't effect stability.
> 
> There's precious little significant testing that I've seen for what it means for running tonnes and tonnes of voices. I've run some of my own tests - and as it happens, just got in a 8TB Sabrent Rocket in a thunderbolt 3 enclosure to test today. Its only PCIE 3.0, but I should be able to compare it to internal NVME (again, I'm only on PCIE 3.0) as well as USB 3.2 (I think I have a USB NVME enclosure somewhere) and then other drives of different types (Glyph Raid, T5's, Bog standard Samsung 860 EVO's and 870QVO's in a blackmagic dock. It might take me a while to get through it all, but I hope at some stage soon to have some decent test results to share. I'm just at the stage where I've finished creating a bunch of customised kontakt instruments designed to highlight differences. (so, running everything from RAM vs tiny pre-load, large sample sets, having each instrument have its own set of samples so kontakt doesn't save RAM etc etc)
> 
> And having the DAW add voices in pre-determined numbers every second to make it easy to identify when things fall over.



Just remember Thunderbolt 3 can only achieve read and write speeds of 1,400 mb/s, transfer speeds don't mean that much. I'm also on the fence about PCI 3.0 vs 4.0. I think Kontakt is the real bottleneck.


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## colony nofi (Jan 3, 2022)

Dracarys said:


> Just remember Thunderbolt 3 can only achieve read and write speeds of 1,400 mb/s, transfer speeds don't mean that much. I'm also on the fence about PCI 3.0 vs 4.0. I think Kontakt is the real bottleneck.


Kontakt is definitely a big bottle neck.
Regarding Thunderbolt 3 - its not true that you can't get higher than 1400mb/s under the right circumstances. With some applications, >2500MB/s from an external thunderbolt drive is very possible. *IF* the drive is using the usb protocol wrapped inside thunderbolt, then the max speed is 10000mb/s (which is 1250MB/s). But this 10Gb/s limit isn't a think for a thunderbolt drive.

oh - and I think you were referring to MB/S - Mb/s is 8 times less.
Gb/s = Giga bits per sec - which is how most networking is measured
Mb/s = Megabit per sec - often how internet speed is measured
MB/s = Megabyte per sec - often how drive performance is measured (only because we measure the size of files in bytes rather than bits due to how operating systems evolved among other fun historical things)

And don't start getting into the different ways different people measure Mb vs Kb - its a mine field and always just to the advantage of the vendor... thus drive companies often use 1024x vs speed measurements that use 1000x etc


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