Ouch. Those are some long loading times.
I was curious if it is a 5400 or 7200 rpm drive, since it is painfully slow with Kontakt, even set up internally. I never tried using a 5400 with Kontakt. I have 5400 RPM external drives to mirror my 8T "work" drive and a 5T for backups of OS & Studio drives, but never used them for anything "real-time" except some movies i have on one.

If it's in the budget of course SSD is the way to go for speed. In the next few months I expect to be investing in large SSD drives myself, as my libraries have overflowed my 5T HDD & 1T of SSD into my 8 TB 'work drive' (download, process & archiving). It makes mirroring / backing up everything more complicated than it should be.
SSD has become so affordable at particular sizes ... And huge external drive to back things up are quite affordable, too.

 

Last edited: Dec 11, 2022

Get an M2 disk, if not possible upgrade your system to a newer architecure.

 

You might as well connect the iD14 to a regular USB3 or USB2 port, and use the USB-C one for the external drives. USB2 is more than fast enough for a 2-channel interface, even if you are running at 192kHz (192kHz * 24bit * 2ch = ~9.2mb/s, and USB2 goes up to 480mb/s)!

EDIT: Just remembered that Audient converters only supports up to 96kHz, so it's even less than 9.2mb/s. Doesn't really matter though, my point is that it's a waste of bandwidth connecting the interface to your only USB-C port.

 

Last edited: Dec 11, 2022

IF you don't wanna read all this crap just go to the bottom for my conclusion

Hey first off yeah sure it will be fast enough but if i can bring in some thoughts i'd like to show you the fastest in the market for now. I have tested this and it actually comes down to your ports which will bottleneck your drive. see the best thing to do as of now is to get a m.2 drive like say a Samsung 980 pro but they max theirs at 2tb. Price/brand etc... (WHEN UPDATED) it can reach sequential read speeds of up to 7,000MB/s and write speeds of up to 5,000MB/s. But that's if you place it directly on the motherboard. If u really wanna get one that does 8tb with those speeds ur looking at close to 1800 $ like sabrent m.2. so best price/size/speed would be to get a 2tb m.2 around 180 - 200 $ Now comes the second part you were talking bout having this external and that's when the speeds are going to take a dive. I have tested 2 options a sabrent usb 3.2 m.2 10gpbs external case and i got around 1000 read write speeds that's when i realised that that was the max for that case/ usb structure. so to get the best speed of an external drive (as of today) you need the enclosure/usb structure to be able to get the speeds through. that best price/ speed i found was orico's enclosure which was thunderbolt3/4 (usb 4) compatible 40gbps. and i got a whooping 2700 read/ write speeds. that's as fast as my m1 13 inc macbook pro!

so in conclusion best bang per buck as of now (and don't forget ur port/ pc has to have a thunderbolt3/4 usb4!



orico nvme usb4 enclosure around 150 $
200$ for a 2tb say samung 980 pro or 100$ for a 1tb

Hope this helps!

 

Last edited: Dec 11, 2022

I already have an M.2 OS drive in the laptop.

 

Cheers for this. My laptop has no thunderbolt though. It has 3.2 Gen2 Type C as it's latest tech available on it.

 

Firstly do batch resave. major difference, just backup first

For highest speed check on YT for comparisons on ssd enclosures (even videos tagged as thunderbolt some of them include usbc3.2 drives)

This youtuber thoroughly compared drive/enclosure pairings and i think he said the Icy box one is the fastest usbc 3.2 gen 2x2 at 2000mb/s READ paired with the 980 pro. (read speed is all you should care about). If you really wna max out the USB3.2 tho make sure you can return the drive because I heard some pc's default to USB 3.2 gen2x1 at half the speed (the M1 macs do this apparently).

IDK your budget is but IMO you might wna consider going less storage (1-2TB M.2 SSD) with a fast enclosure like icy box instead of doing SATA SSD at 500mb/s with more storage. Then load all unused kontakt libs onto HDD or just get a cheap sata later for bulk.

Dropping a bunch of cash right now on a giant 8TB m.2 NVME and enclosure if you only have 3.2 gen2x2 will potentially be a bit overpriced if you cant use it on thunderbolt atleast (I also have usb 3.2 2x2).

Otherwise if you want 8tB I would say best option is SATA ssd and enclosure (check comparisons).

To get max throughput on the 3.2 gen2x2 I would go with cheap m.2 2TB high READ SPEED with fast enclosure. from what I can tell, fastest advertised drives scale too when bottlenecked by a slower connection. so the 980pro will still perform better when bottlenecked by usb 3.2 gen2x1 than for example an intel SSD.

Personally I'm using a 1TB samsung T7 that caps out at 800mb/s over USB3.2 gen2x2 and I'm more than happy with only 400GB of libraries that I actually use. I saw that recently there was a way better drive/enclosure pairing for far cheaper that does about 400mb/s better speed so If I could have gone back I would have gotten that. but I'm not phased about that. For me the big FOMO is gna be when USB4 Drives start hitting 4000+ MB at AFFORDABLE prices then I'll want to upgrade my pc for USB4 (2-3 years). anyone have any thoughts on when these USB4 drives are gna start getting those speeds? at non-redonculous prices..

 

Ok, so with my newly armed information, and proper consideration of my limitations, being:

• no thunderbolt port
• USB 3.1 Gen2 Type C 10Gbps is available
• potential slower speed of 8TB SSD due to QLC tech

....would this solution be a good one as an alternative that cost pretty much the same as an 8TB SSD?

1. Yottamaster DR2RC3-25 USB 3.1 Gen2 Type C external 2x2.5" enclosure
2. 2 x 4TB Crucial MX500 SSDs (Model: CT4000MX500SSD1)

Set these up as JBOD in all likelihood, and connected via USB 3.1 Gen2 Type C cable and port to get the 10Gbps speed. Or, I do have a mechanical 8TB HDD I can back up critical data onto, and then use the enclosure and SSDs in RAID 0, though not sure if this is worth the risk of data loss in terms of whether I'd get any speed increase from setting up as RAID 0?

Any thoughts?

 

it's not a myth, happened to my 500GB Samsung 860 EVO SATAIII SSD, it just died while in use, after reboot even BIOS couldn't see it, zero chance for any data recovery,
I returned it within warranty period (it was less than 9 months old, bought new) and they gave me new one because they couldn't find any excuse for user error or recover its functionality - obviously I lost everything, luckily it was a system disk, so no valuable data there

 

Sure. If you can't change your harddrive, just use an external SSD and you're fine.

My three Kontakt folders:




... you guessed it, I had to get multiple external SSDs. I'd prefer an 8TB harddrive over this clusterfuck all day.

 

you should use 8To classic drive only for backup storage (read only usage).

and use a smaller 2To ssd for working (read & write), selecting the instruments that you need in a project.
because you will never use all the libraries in a song.

this is the more secure solution, also lighter for the kontakt database build/load and system indexation.
the best way to kill the mft is to charge the system with billion of samples adress.

libraries using samples container are better for the system, you can move or delete them faster than extracted samples.
some original libraries are very badly packed without container, it is super long when you need to move them.

this is done whith the nks integration of all native access products, but not the case for a lot of developpers.
spifire, 8dio, audiofier... and others dev packaging is really bad for the machine.

 

I put all my libraries on an 8tb western digital black mechanical drive that is accessed via wifi from my download computer.
It is bearable on load speeds but it is loud as hell anytime I start up Kontakt.
I am going to use that as back up and slowly go through everything and put on ssds.

I recommend 2TB Samsung T7 and keep your current discs as backup. Just buy as many as you need at your leisure. I saw a few reviews for the 8TB Samsung QVO drive (which is the cheapest for that size) that claim they fail after a year.

 

more than enough for all the stuff you will really use.

2X 4To ( main libls + backup ) is more wise imo.
otherwise, it's a SSD deck, like black magic: 4 slots in RAID.

 

I have taken a punt on this. Going to use m6 mechanical 8TB as a backup drive for critical libraries etc. then going to load up Kontakt libraries and Spectrasonics STEAM folder onto these dual 4TB SSDs in this enclosure. Hoping it’ll be silent and speedy, but will report back in case anyone is interested.

 

Put that 8Tb inside your laptop!!

 

Well, in this case, you might want to have a look at an external NVME Case and disk: https://www.axagon.eu/en/produkty/eem2-ug2

 

I've been looking for decent enclosures,
problem is, even the USB-C 3.2 GEN 2 is "only" 10Gbit (if computer supports it), then there's USB-C 3.2 GEN 2x2 which is 20Gbit (even fewer computers support that), and then even top-end Thunderbolt 4 gives "only" 40Gbit which roughly equates to 5GB/s which any casual NVME PCIe 4.0 can deliver,
with small files, speeds are way lower, so even high-quality NVME drives may provide consistent 1-2Gbit speeds, but that is overkill for occassional sound libraries imo....

 

Kontakt will be about as fast using NVMe as using SATA III when playing an instrument (random read speed)
There is a small benefit when loading libraries (maybe 10% faster with NVMe)

Reason is Kontakt is a huge bottleneck in itself so it doesn't really matter that much using NVMe or not.

 

every time I see someone saying such things, I ask them about Kontakt Batch Resave function