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M2 NVMe drives vs standard SSDs for heavy Sample Library use?

Boulez

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Hello Folks

Newbie here. Are there some heavy users of Orchestral Sample Libraries here? Am I in the right part of the forum? I have some questions about NVMe drives vs standard SSDs. I've read what I can find, but would be grateful for more clarity if possible!

Are heavy sample library users now employing things like Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe Card (Silent) with NVMe SSDs as their main sample drives? https://www.sonnettech.com/product/m2-4 ... rview.html Have these now basically replaced SATA SSDs as the storage platform of choice? Is NVMe now the recommended setup, regardless of price? That's my impression...

I have a 2019 Mac Pro 16-Core, and will soon invest in bits of VSL, Spitfire BBC, Orchestral Tools, Synthogy Ivory and other instrument libraries. I’ll use large templates in Logic and the work will be in extreme detail. So I'm wondering...

If you’re using Sonnet/M2/NVMe (or similar), relative to SATA SSDs, are you experiencing:

1. Reduced wait when loading large templates?
2. Smooth and trouble-free playing of instrument samples?
3. Any over-heating of the M2 NVMe SSDs during short or long sessions?
4. Any other problems / issues?

Do you recommend this route—or have alternative suggestions?

I’m not toooo concerned about cost—I’m mainly just interested in getting maximum speed, efficiency and reliability.

Also, from what I gather, there seems to be a debate whether Samsung 970 Evo Plus (or Samsung 970 Pro for reliability?) or perhaps Intel Optane is best for sample library use. Anyone have direct experience or comparison of these? Or did I misunderstand?

Any advice would be much appreciated as I’m much more musician than computer hardware expert!

Thanks
 
Have you seen these threads?


 
Thanks kmaster! Yes, I had read (some of) this but confess (a) I found it confusing and did not find the clarity I was looking for (b) the early part of the threads are 2 + 1/2 years old, so I wasn't sure how much is still relevant now. That said, maybe I should try again? Or maybe there's a summary of conclusions (if there are conclusions) somewhere?

I'm in the UK and will be sleeping for a while in case you (or anyone answers) quickly. Thanks again, appreciated.
 
I've recently installed an NVMe WD Black SN750 2TB to replace 4 SATA SSDs and I have to say that it has made a real difference here, in loading time and as well as general samples playing stability.
 
When I went from HDD to SATA III SSD I saw a huge reduction in load times and huge increase in voice counts. When I went from SATA III SSD to NVME I saw very little change in load times (*maybe* 10% better) and absoultely no change in voice counts. Anything over 500 MB/s read and 100k IOPS seems to provide little benefit as far as I can tell.

There are definitely a lot of discussions on this topic but I'd say my experience is consistent with those who have measured load times and voice counts for large templates.

It seems there are a few particular libraries that show some benefit in load times but because it's just one library here and there it doesn't matter in terms of overall productivity. Going from 10 seconds to 5 seconds on one library is a 50% reduction, yes, but it's only 5 seconds...

rgames
 
When I went from HDD to SATA III SSD I saw a huge reduction in load times and huge increase in voice counts. When I went from SATA III SSD to NVME I saw very little change in load times (*maybe* 10% better) and absoultely no change in voice counts. Anything over 500 MB/s read and 100k IOPS seems to provide little benefit as far as I can tell.

There are definitely a lot of discussions on this topic but I'd say my experience is consistent with those who have measured load times and voice counts for large templates.

It seems there are a few particular libraries that show some benefit in load times but because it's just one library here and there it doesn't matter in terms of overall productivity. Going from 10 seconds to 5 seconds on one library is a 50% reduction, yes, but it's only 5 seconds...

rgames

I guess begs the question, when one needs an improvement in voice counts (or really just voices being dropped in heavy situations such as orchestral tutti), what would you say is the best course of action?
 
I guess begs the question, when one needs an improvement in voice counts (or really just voices being dropped in heavy situations such as orchestral tutti), what would you say is the best course of action?
I think slave machines are still the best option if you're hitting voice count limitations. Also speeds up load times much more than anything you can do on a single machine because you have multiple disk-to-RAM pathways. Two eight-core systems will (likely) vastly outperform a single sixteen-core system in terms of load times and voice counts.

But I really don't hit voice count limitations these days. So if you can live with the load times, working from a single machine is definitely do-able unless you're running a ton of mic positions. It's very dependent on what you write and what libraries you use.

rgames
 
Hi All, thanks for the responses.

So, what I gather is, yes the NMVe drives work more-or-less reliably, and while there may be some speed gains compared to SATA SSD, they are not that significant, except maybe in certain cases. And so, it might be worth waiting until NMVe prices come down a bit... or just take the hit and run with it. Cool.

In which case, can I just check the temperature question? This review of the Samsung 970 Evo Plus

shows (@ 3’ 40”) a temperature of 93 degrees, admittedly with ‘extreme’ use.

Many years ago I had the Mac G5; when the fans started it sounded like Concorde taking off! (OK, that dates me…). Anyway, one of the incentives for paying Apple Tax (for the 2019 Mac Pro) was to get a near-silent machine (it isn’t actually silent, but it is damn quiet). And so, what I DON’T want to do is to add-in components that again make my studio sound like Heathrow Airport (or Dallas Fort Worth).

So, does anybody run NVMe SSD on a 2019 Mac Pro? Do they run hot (or very hot) during extended sample library use?

A technical thing I don’t know: I can imagine that writing to a drive generates more heat than reading from it. Is that true? If true, it would put my mind at rest somewhat.

Thanks!
 
Hi Neutron Star, Thanks. Is that loading in very large templates (like complete VSL or Spitfire orchestra)?
 
Yes. The piece I am working on at the moment has about forty instances of kontakt, and 6 instances of Omnisphere. Some of the individual sounds are around 1.5gb. I am using Studio one 5, and you can see them loading on startup. its so fast it's really just a blur.
 
Thanks Neutron Star, good to know!

I'm particularly interested to know whether the same is the case for products like VSL, Orchestral Tools, Spitfire BBC SO, etc. I'm not sure why it might be different—then again there are often surprises with these dang computers.
 
I have products from virtually all the big names. The developer is irrelevant. it's just the ram footprint of each sound. As i said, the loads speeds are astonishing from both types!
 
NVMe is definitely better than SSD as the NVMe modules will utilise the motherboard's native speeds, whereas SSDs can only go as fast as the SATA2 interface (circa 600MB/sec - I think thats right). I have a dual-Intel CPU workstation PC (Windows10Pro with 512GB RAM) with 4x 2TB Samsung 970 NVMe PCIE drives mounted on the motherboard and loading around 200GB samples in one go is really fast - about 14 minutes with each NVMe having around 3200MB/sec read time. I've had this setup for about a year. Before then I used standalone (not RAID) SSDs and the load time was around 1 to 2 hours.
We also have a bunch of Dell servers with 14TB RAID0 spread over 9x 2TB SSDs (Samsung 860 EVO) networked over a 10GBE network from which we load instruments and sample libraries and these load fairly quickly (between 60 and 90 minutes for around 5TB of samples loaded) which again is fairly fast - but not as fast as NVMe drives. With speeds like these it means we can shtdown and reboot servers etc quickly and therefore save a load of $$$ in energy bills as we don't need everything up and running all the time.
 
Many thanks Jonathan and Neutron Star again.

My background is that I got into this in the 1990’s (Atari, Notator), continued for 15 years or so (Gigasampler)… then returned to working with pen and paper… and am only now just getting back into it, attracted mainly by improvements in the (relative) realism of acoustic instrument libraries, computer speeds etc. So—I can’t really judge the ‘speediness’ or otherwise of these load times etc – but it’s really helpful to have an idea!

Interesting that people are having different experiences re the speed of NVMe vs SATA SSDs.

Perhaps these result from difference of OS (Mac / Windows / Linux and which versions), computer specification, and the relative quantities (number Gbs) that different users tend to work with and consider normal?
 
NVME has a much higher spec than SATA. However, it is not the bottleneck. It's the software that uses it. Your OS daw kontakt etc.( Studio one 5 loads much much faster than version 3.5 ) I have the same libraries on a NVME and SSD. They both load just as quickly. If there is a difference, its microseconds. I recently built a computer with an NVME for both OS and for sample libraries on the belief they would make a big difference. In real world use, i have detected nothing. The only exception would be writing say 5 gig file. NVME is faster then.
 
In which case, can I just check the temperature question? This review of the Samsung 970 Evo Plus
shows (@ 3’ 40”) a temperature of 93 degrees, admittedly with ‘extreme’ use.

There are newer PCIe drives which are much more power efficient than the 970 EVO Plus.

sustained-rr-eff.png



sustained-sr-eff.png


Images taken from this review:

Samsung SSDs are a premium price now because they were the number one for consumer SSDs many years ago.
I don't see that they are generally worth a premium these days.
It's not as if they have a great track record in quality; the 840 and 840 Evos had a major issue which took them over a year to fix. Should have been recalled as they weren't fit for purpose.
 
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Massive apologies if the following comes across as snarky - it's not meant to.

I think unless your pursuing these things at scale, (1) The time saved by using the faster drives is completely frittered away by the amount of time we (all) spend on the forum debating these things and (2) You can use those previous extra seconds while waiting for a load to inhale more coffee. 👍
 
Hello Folks

Newbie here. Are there some heavy users of Orchestral Sample Libraries here? Am I in the right part of the forum? I have some questions about NVMe drives vs standard SSDs. I've read what I can find, but would be grateful for more clarity if possible!

Are heavy sample library users now employing things like Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe Card (Silent) with NVMe SSDs as their main sample drives? https://www.sonnettech.com/product/m2-4 ... rview.html Have these now basically replaced SATA SSDs as the storage platform of choice? Is NVMe now the recommended setup, regardless of price? That's my impression...

I have a 2019 Mac Pro 16-Core, and will soon invest in bits of VSL, Spitfire BBC, Orchestral Tools, Synthogy Ivory and other instrument libraries. I’ll use large templates in Logic and the work will be in extreme detail. So I'm wondering...

If you’re using Sonnet/M2/NVMe (or similar), relative to SATA SSDs, are you experiencing:

1. Reduced wait when loading large templates?
2. Smooth and trouble-free playing of instrument samples?
3. Any over-heating of the M2 NVMe SSDs during short or long sessions?
4. Any other problems / issues?

Do you recommend this route—or have alternative suggestions?

I’m not toooo concerned about cost—I’m mainly just interested in getting maximum speed, efficiency and reliability.

Also, from what I gather, there seems to be a debate whether Samsung 970 Evo Plus (or Samsung 970 Pro for reliability?) or perhaps Intel Optane is best for sample library use. Anyone have direct experience or comparison of these? Or did I misunderstand?

Any advice would be much appreciated as I’m much more musician than computer hardware expert!

Thanks
No, NVMe are absolutely not the standard. I think the majority of musicians have never tried one.

If you see any change, it will ONLY be in speed of loading. None of the other things you mention.

People will ONLY see a change of speed based on what the NVMe is hooked to. It's just a fast car on the information highway and if there's traffic, it can only go so fast. For example, what generation is the PCIe port? This is why when you go on Amazon and look on reviews you get very happy customers and very angry customers. After all there are many drives in the same size that are SATA, so they are the same as regular SSDs, just smaller, and a lot of people don't understand this.

I have used these things for years and they have made a big difference for me:
Some libraries work fine on a 7200 drive, and that's where I keep them.
Some of my libraries load fine on my SSDs and that's where I keep them.
With SOME libraries--and only some--they load in 10-15 seconds on a regular SSD vs vs insta-load on the NVme. Totally depends on the library and I have no idea why that is.

With all the others it is a not a big difference. I use that NVMe space carefully.

So I agree 100% with people who say they found zero difference. People can say I'm wrong, but their experience does not disprove mine, in fact it confirms what I have found to be true, more times than not. NVme is not going to super-charge everything. But it doesn't need to cost more and it can be useful.

Unless you are a Samsung snob, the prices are practically the same. But I don't plan to only buy NVmes because on my motherboard, I lose two SATA slots for every NVMe I install on the motherboard. And I only have a limited amount of PCie ports. I don't know what the story is with your Mac Pro, but you should read the manual.

So unless you are strategic and buy multi-TB NVme drives, you may be putting limits on future internal expansion.

My next purchase is going to be to add more RAM. Rightly or wrongly, I believe that will help me work with bigger templates. Anyway, I'm doing it.
 
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Many thanks Technostica. Please excuse the seriously non-technical reply – but what you’re saying here is that this Hynix card will use less power, therefore will not get so hot, so Heathrow Airport syndrome is more likely to be avoided. Correct?

Thank you Alex, not snarky at all, point understood. I will be pursuing these things at scale. I’m a ‘classical’ composer (whatever that means these days…) in my 60s, and am getting into this MIDI thing again to complete some big orchestral pieces which have enormous amounts of detail. I really don’t mean to waste anyone’s time. If my questions are a bit naïve it’s because (a) I’m pretty non-technical and struggle to understand a lot of this stuff! And (b) I hate fighting with technology (have done enough of it in my time) and would love (if possible) to get it right first time with populating the Mac.

Thanks also Tiger the Frog, much appreciate the comments. Not a snob (Samsung or any other kind!). I ask about Samsung because I used their HDs in PCs for years and never had an issue, and they do well in speed tests in reviews... but I'm learning here that this is probably not important. Re Mac Pro, yes I’ve read the ‘white paper’ (and the short blurb that passes for a manual…). I've also been in touch with Sonnet direct, who were very helpful but surely wanted to sell me their products. In fact I'm a PC guy, not particularly a Mac fan, but having used Logic for so many years, feel tied in. Maybe that’s a mistake, but I’ve made it now. BTW, what is ‘BF’? Thanks!
 
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