# The impact of RAM speeds and SSDs on kontakt's performance



## IgnasiVelasco (Mar 11, 2015)

So as you'll see now I'm no expert in the matter but I've been thinking about how these two elements (RAM mhz speeds and SSDs) influence Kontakt, and there's something I don't seem to understand.

When you load a patch you can clearly see how RAM usage starts to increase. If that's true, why do people focus on using SSDs to reduce loading times? Despite the fact that libraries are loaded from an SSD/HDD, some parts end up stored as RAM, depending on your configuration, but nobody talks about RAM mhz speeds and everybody's talking about using SSDs.
When somebody complains that libraries take too long to load, one of the replies tends to be "get an SSD" (appart from adjusting kontakt's config)... but isn't the speed of RAM influential in this process? Why is it overlooked? Or is it just my imagination?

I'd just want to understand this a little better.

Thank you.


----------



## mk282 (Mar 11, 2015)

SSDs load stuff MUCH faster than HDD. RAM speed is purely significant when communicating with the CPU, not Kontakt per se.


----------



## Guy Rowland (Mar 11, 2015)

I think it's been pretty much settled by more intelligent and experienced people than I that RAM speed has very little / no practical difference to sample use.

SSD not only speeds up data going into the sampler, it does it so fast you also need less of it. You can reduce the preload buffers, and even run purged. So less RAM needed means shorter loading times, on top of the faster data transfer rates.


----------



## IgnasiVelasco (Mar 11, 2015)

Well, I'm aware of the huge improvement of SSD over HDD, but does that mean that RAM speeds in Mhz and CAS latency are irrelevant in comparison?

Edit: Sorry Guy, didn't see your message. That makes a lot of sense  thank you guy(s) :D


----------



## yannistzav (May 11, 2015)

To add something to the conversation, I think it matters if the Library is DFD (direct from disk streaming) or it loads from RAM.


----------



## mk282 (May 11, 2015)

Of course it matters - with DFD, SSD performance will definitely come into play.


----------



## Nick Batzdorf (May 11, 2015)

What's interesting is that loading my orchestral template from standard drives got considerably faster when I switched to an SSD system drive.


----------



## Iostream (May 11, 2015)

The explanation here is rather simple. When you load a sample into kontakt and see that memory usage increase, this is kontakt loading samples from disk into memory. Until you reach a point that you can read from your disk faster than you can write to memory, the disk is the bottleneck here, and faster memory will make no difference. We have a very long way to go before that is the case. 
There are some areas where faster memory can make a difference, but the differences are very small and nowhere near as noticeable compared to loading samples from SSD vs spinning disk.


----------



## JohnG (May 11, 2015)

IgnasiVelasco @ 11th March 2015 said:


> Well, I'm aware of the huge improvement of SSD over HDD, but does that mean that RAM speeds in Mhz and CAS latency are irrelevant in comparison?



Yes


----------

