# System AND samples on one SSD drive?



## LOU AU (Mar 2, 2018)

Hi everyone. I am on a 2008 mac - 8 core zeon, 16 gigs, 250 system drive and 3 additional 250 velociraptor drives. I am out of space for samples and the guy at my local mom and pop Mac store is telling me to put everything on one 2 terrabyte drive and use the velociraptors for incidental things. I have a LOT of libraries and am thinking it could create a bottleneck to have everything on one drive. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!


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## Johnny (Mar 3, 2018)

LOU AU said:


> Hi everyone. I am on a 2008 mac - 8 core zeon, 16 gigs, 250 system drive and 3 additional 250 velociraptor drives. I am out of space for samples and the guy at my local mom and pop Mac store is telling me to put everything on one 2 terrabyte drive and use the velociraptors for incidental things. I have a LOT of libraries and am thinking it could create a bottleneck to have everything on one drive. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!


I was just going to post a similar question. I watched a Spitfire creative cribs where they interviewed a working film composer and his computer tech daisy chained 5 or 10 SSD's together with a single piece of hardware? The computer was then able to consolidate all of his drives into one glorious drive path- C:/!!! I wonder what technology he used to do this? Thx


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## tack (Mar 3, 2018)

Johnny said:


> The computer was then able to consolidate all of his drives into one glorious drive path- C:/!!! I wonder what technology he used to do this?


On Windows you can mount disks as paths within an existing filesystem rather than a separate drive.

Alternatively, what I do is use junction points to map Kontakt libraries strewn across various disks to consolidate them under one folder. This lets me move libraries around to between my differently performing and differently sized drives based on need, and Kontakt is none the wiser.


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## wayne_rowley (Mar 4, 2018)

You can also mount drives to specific mount points in Unix, so it's probably possible with a Mac as well, with the right command.

Anyhow, on my 2011 MacBook Pro I run all samples from my system SSD. I've never had any problems, but then again the limited RAM of the MBP limits my template and project size. 

No matter how many sample libraries you have, you're unlikely to be using everything at once. I think you'd be fine as long as you leave plenty of free space for the system to breath, and purge your samples if you have a large template.

Wayne


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## Johnny (Mar 4, 2018)

Is it possible to buy an external Raid Array for SSD's? Something to split your libraries up between several drives via external hardware? My motherboard only supports two extra Sata connections, im hoping to add about 6 to 8 drives?... Any hardware recommendations to do this?


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## EvilDragon (Mar 4, 2018)

You don't need an external array... You can get an additional PCIe card that has extra SATA ports. See how I did it:

https://vi-control.net/community/threads/anybody-using-a-pcie-nvme-ssd.48048/page-3#post-4095551

Also you do NOT need RAID in any form for this.


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## sostenuto (Mar 4, 2018)

Do Symbolic Links have some role here ?

Just added 2nd 500GB EVO850 SSD (and some 7200 HDD(s)) and out of SATA slots. Also trying to figure best locations of progs/data ……..


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## tack (Mar 4, 2018)

sostenuto said:


> Do Symbolic Links have some role here ?


Symlinks would make more sense on Unixen to be sure.

On Windows, symlinks, unlike junctions, can be used to address network attached storage, so if you're trying to map in a subdirectory on a network drive, you'd need to use a symlink. However most of us probably aren't interested in doing that, in which case the benefit of a junction is that it doesn't require escalated privileges to create.

FWIW, for managing these things on Windows, I use this very handy shell extension.


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## sostenuto (Mar 4, 2018)

tack said:


> Symlinks would make more sense on Unixen to be sure.
> 
> On Windows, symlinks, unlike junctions, can be used to address network attached storage, so if you're trying to map in a subdirectory on a network drive, you'd need to use a symlink. However most of us probably aren't interested in doing that, in which case the benefit of a junction is that it doesn't require escalated privileges to create.
> 
> FWIW, for managing these things on Windows, I use this very handy shell extension.



Thank-you! Trying to get better with subtleties of each of these tools. Appreciate the Link!


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## Johnny (Mar 4, 2018)

EvilDragon said:


> You don't need an external array... You can get an additional PCIe card that has extra SATA ports. See how I did it:
> 
> https://vi-control.net/community/threads/anybody-using-a-pcie-nvme-ssd.48048/page-3#post-4095551
> 
> Also you do NOT need RAID in any form for this.


Excellent! Thank you for the advice!


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## LOU AU (Mar 5, 2018)

So ... it is not a problem using the system drive and samples/vi's on the same drive if the ssd is big enough (2T)? Has anyone tried this?


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## synthpunk (Mar 5, 2018)

Having your system boot drive and samples separated on different drives is worthwhile and has benefits.

Like E.D. said above. What you were referring to was a Raid 0 I believe. Which daisy multiple chained drives into one large partition.

The main disadvantage of this rigging is if one of the drives in the raid goes bad you loose the data on all the drives.

This is a method they use at Abbey Road but I'm not sure exactly for what purpose other than extra speed which is really not needed for samples but may come in handy for large Pro Tools live orchestral sessions for ie.

Here is a explanation with the different kind of Raid configurations.
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/answer/RAID-types-and-benefits-explained

I use Raid 1 for storage backup to mirrored drives for data redundancy.



EvilDragon said:


> You don't need an external array... You can get an additional PCIe card that has extra SATA ports. See how I did it:
> 
> https://vi-control.net/community/threads/anybody-using-a-pcie-nvme-ssd.48048/page-3#post-4095551
> 
> Also you do NOT need RAID in any form for this.


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## Symfoniq (Mar 6, 2018)

LOU AU said:


> So ... it is not a problem using the system drive and samples/vi's on the same drive if the ssd is big enough (2T)? Has anyone tried this?



Absolutely not a problem. From a performance standpoint, the practice of keeping OS and data on separate physical drives is a relic of the hard drive era. Today's SATA SSDs are almost always fast enough to keep both your OS and and data responsive. And in the rare case a SATA SSD isn't fast enough, a high-end NVMe SSD will be fast enough.

(The above answer is true most of the time. If you're building a database server, for example, caveats may apply.)

There are still _administrative/organizational_ benefits to having a separate OS drive, and I still do this because my workstation contains numerous SSDs. But performance isn't really a reason to do this anymore for most usage scenarios.


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## chimuelo (Mar 6, 2018)

I used a laptop with a single storage device for live work that had Kontakt Omnisphere PianoTeq and Windows 7 with a 2.2GHz 8GBs DDR3 and it worked fine.
It was the very first NVMe M.2, the Samsung XP941.

RAID 1 isnt going to save your recording. Just back ups the data.
When the failure occurs during Audio there’s a glitch as the back up comes online.
This is why in mission critical automated Cirque shows or even Brittany Spears or Elton John use Multiple redundant PCs with 32/64/96 channel Audio Switchers.

I use Acronis for back ups.
If I ever have a drive failure I can hot swap.
Still miss 4-8bars but have hardware to get through any train wreck.
I avoid failures by rotating out drives after 1 year.
Sure I have a huge collection of SSDs.
48 x 512GB SSDs.
All updated every couple months.

1 failure in 15 years and Supermicro BIOS Management told my OS Drive was failing pre show diagnostics. Swapped it out and 15 seconds later the new hot spare passed.

I learned all of this the hard way in the Gigastudio era.
That PC still works too.
It was a Supermicro P4SCT+II with RAID 5 using Zero Channel RAID.
We spent a fortune just to watch a simulated failure where another drive comes online during the Array Rebuild. I couldn’t even call up Scarbee Rhodes or GigaPiano.
RAID works fine for data based servers, but we used cached RAM and Audio is a whole different beast. If you’re using motherboard based RAID it’s even worse as your CPU takes a big hit.
Dedicated RAID Cards were struggling, I’d hate to see Intels Rapid Storage RAID take a hit.
You may as well go get lunch during that rebuild.


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## LOU AU (Mar 6, 2018)

Thank you all for the responses. I just ordered the drive. I'll let you know how it goes once I get it up and running.


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