tack
Damned Dirty Ape
On the subject of the benefit of NVMe over a modest SATA SSD, specifically as it relates to Kontakt, I've commented here and elsewhere that:
Having now investigated this a bit more, I need to moderate my position. The truth is it can help, depending on what you're measuring.
There are of course a lot of aspects to Kontakt performance (another big one being DFD streaming with various preload buffers), but I wanted to answer the one I personally found most annoying: can an NVMe make my project load times faster?
So I've done a bit of benchmarking and technical analysis (you know, for fun) trying to suss out what's going on (as best as I can given Kontakt's a black box).
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wL8XYGgd_O9fomMrK1EpSnZJeQwhVOAn91e82byj8s4/edit?usp=sharing
The doc is a bit eye-glazing so I'll just cut to the chase:
Note that this is all quite specific to Kontakt. The ability to fully take advantage of system resources depends quite a lot on software design. So these findings aren't going to be transportable to other VIs (e.g. UVI, Omnisphere, etc).
I've posed some questions in the doc that I'd be keen to hear ideas on. Notably the fact that disk utilization % doesn't seem to map predictably onto actual disk usage metrics (throughput and IOPS) relative to the benchmarked capacity at equivalent block sizes. I proposed a possible explanation as to why that might be (the section titled "Kontakt's File Access Pathology") but I'm a bit skeptical that's the real explanation.
Cheers!
At least with Kontakt's compressed samples, NVMe is completely wasted. Decent SATA SSDs are too for that matter: I bottleneck my CPU decompressing the samples as they're being loaded in long before I bottleneck my storage.
Having now investigated this a bit more, I need to moderate my position. The truth is it can help, depending on what you're measuring.
There are of course a lot of aspects to Kontakt performance (another big one being DFD streaming with various preload buffers), but I wanted to answer the one I personally found most annoying: can an NVMe make my project load times faster?
So I've done a bit of benchmarking and technical analysis (you know, for fun) trying to suss out what's going on (as best as I can given Kontakt's a black box).
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wL8XYGgd_O9fomMrK1EpSnZJeQwhVOAn91e82byj8s4/edit?usp=sharing
The doc is a bit eye-glazing so I'll just cut to the chase:
- Where "project load" is measured as "I can start using my DAW now" the answer is no.
- Where "project load" is measured as "all samples are fully loaded into memory and the system is idle" the answer is yes. Unless you run everything purged.
Note that this is all quite specific to Kontakt. The ability to fully take advantage of system resources depends quite a lot on software design. So these findings aren't going to be transportable to other VIs (e.g. UVI, Omnisphere, etc).
I've posed some questions in the doc that I'd be keen to hear ideas on. Notably the fact that disk utilization % doesn't seem to map predictably onto actual disk usage metrics (throughput and IOPS) relative to the benchmarked capacity at equivalent block sizes. I proposed a possible explanation as to why that might be (the section titled "Kontakt's File Access Pathology") but I'm a bit skeptical that's the real explanation.
Cheers!