KVR Audio

airforce111 · Post by **airforce111** » Wed Dec 18, 2019 4:23 pm

I was planning on getting a Samsung QVO 2TB SSD for all of my samples (it doesn't have to be an incredibly high end ssd) but was wondering if its better to distribute the samples to 2x 1TB SSD Drives for less strain on 1 SSD instead? Which would be better?

Currently I have samples distributed over 2 mechanical Hard Drives, same practice with the SSD?

Steve Bolivar · Post by **Steve Bolivar** » Wed Dec 18, 2019 6:13 pm

Is your 2 drive set up a RAID 0 where the 2 drives appear and operate as a single drive? I use a single 1TB SSD for my Kontakt libraries and it seems plenty fast for loading instruments.

Googly Smythe · Post by **Googly Smythe** » Wed Dec 18, 2019 6:18 pm

I don't think ssds suffer from strain - no moving parts. I'm getting a single M2 drive to put all my samples on...

airforce111 · Post by **airforce111** » Wed Dec 18, 2019 7:07 pm

They're seen as separate drives, no raid. So I guess it seems ssds don't suffer strain then?

pljones · Post by **pljones** » Wed Dec 18, 2019 9:34 pm

The only benefit I can think of is if the reads can come through different paths to the data buses on the CPU cores and that would depend on driver design, I'd guess. I've got a single drive. I like them loaded as much as possible into RAM, though, as I'm playing live, so it's more about length of load up time... but I've only 32Gb RAM - I need more! (Why didn't I get 64Gb...)

DJ Warmonger · Post by **DJ Warmonger** » Thu Dec 19, 2019 8:50 am

Two SSD drives can run in parallel, if your motherboard supports enough PCI lines. It is equivalent of running RAID 0, thus their speed adds up. However, configuring RAID 0 will make both drives go down if one break, while running them as separate drives make the independent of each other. You will have to distribute files between drives manually, tho.

drdriller · Post by **drdriller** » Thu Dec 19, 2019 9:22 am

I was planning on getting a Samsung QVO 2TB SSD for all of my samples (it doesn't have to be an incredibly high end ssd) but was wondering if its better to distribute the samples to 2x 1TB SSD Drives for less strain on 1 SSD instead? Which would be better?

2 drive seems useless with the ssd performance, you don't even need a good ssd.

if you want performance go for a high end NVme ssd, 2 raid 0 ssd should be 2 times faster, a nvme ssd should be 6 times faster.

in reality you won't gain anything because standard ssd is already enough to be slowed by other components.

Tj Shredder · Post by **Tj Shredder** » Tue Dec 24, 2019 2:46 pm

If you just fill it with samples and then read them, they won’t fail until you get 20 TB for under $50... Only writing puts strain on them, but usually you can write constantly for years on them before they fail... Even a raid 0 config won’t give you more speed, as the bottleneck is the connection...
1 drive is the answer... (plus a backup of course...)

pljones · Post by **pljones** » Tue Dec 24, 2019 6:12 pm

Oh, whilst we're on the subject... Swap space. If I put that on an SSD, of course it's faster than HDD - but is it going to put enough write strain on the swap area to cause issues? Should I just have no swap (as I've actually no HDDs in the box)?

Pictus · Post by **Pictus** » Wed Dec 25, 2019 12:02 pm

Issues?
Writing in SSD shortens its lifespan, buy a model with higher endurance and no problem.
To have an idea about SSD endurance check https://3dnews.ru/938764/page-3.html

NVMe vs SATA: Will it make Kontakt faster?
https://vi-control.net/community/thread ... ter.69572/

pljones · Post by **pljones** » Wed Dec 25, 2019 1:03 pm

Yeah, I went for #2 and #3 on that list

. The swap's on the #2. (Still, I should have gone for 64GB RAM...)

Tj Shredder · Post by **Tj Shredder** » Wed Dec 25, 2019 2:30 pm

That list are official numbers from the vendors. According to the German c’t magazine, which made some real world strain tests, even the worst broke much much later. All made it multiple times as long. But as I said, as long you do backups you are safe anyway and you can expect them to sustain longer than your need for a bigger drive for much less money you pay now, will make all these worries obsolete...
Better invest in backup drives which are cheap if you get normal hard drives...

teilo · Post by **teilo** » Fri Dec 27, 2019 7:21 pm

SSDs in a RAID configuration only make sense if either you want a very large volume that you can't get on a single disk, or if you need the IOPS, or if you need redundancy (RAID 1 or RAID 10 — never do RAID 5 or 6 on SSDs, because of write wear).

So for sample sets, it makes no sense to do anything but a single volume, unless your libraries are too big to fit on a single disk.

DJ Warmonger · Post by **DJ Warmonger** » Fri Dec 27, 2019 7:26 pm

pljones wrote: ↑Tue Dec 24, 2019 6:12 pm Oh, whilst we're on the subject... Swap space. If I put that on an SSD, of course it's faster than HDD - but is it going to put enough write strain on the swap area to cause issues? Should I just have no swap (as I've actually no HDDs in the box)?

Absolutely. Swap space is the thing of past, only used when you run out of RAM. It shouldn't happen at all in correctly designed rig.

Googly Smythe · Post by **Googly Smythe** » Fri Dec 27, 2019 8:57 pm

DJ Warmonger wrote: ↑Fri Dec 27, 2019 7:26 pm
pljones wrote: ↑Tue Dec 24, 2019 6:12 pm Oh, whilst we're on the subject... Swap space. If I put that on an SSD, of course it's faster than HDD - but is it going to put enough write strain on the swap area to cause issues? Should I just have no swap (as I've actually no HDDs in the box)?
Absolutely. Swap space is the thing of past, only used when you run out of RAM. It shouldn't happen at all in correctly designed rig.

If you want some pedantry, swapfile.sys is used by those new fangled Windows Apps, and is rarely more than 250 mbytes in size. pagefile.sys is what most people mean when they say "swapfile", and yes, it's irrelevant if you have more than 32 gigs of RAM.

1 big SSD, or 2 distributed SSD's for Kontakt Samples???