Yeah, hopefully you can get back to us on how you get on; maybe one of the only times I'd take real-world, anecdotal feedback over the tested (garbage imo) data from manufacturers? I would like (2x?) 4tb drive(s) in my laptop, but installing it is quite a pain; not sth I wanna do more than once! Or at all, rly =)

Spoiler

NMVe is great, tho; instant loading, gigabyte copy in a ~second ftw. How do you connect to (I'm assuming server on wired network?) everything up to get good speeds? Or is it just a desktop?

 

this.

a friend of mine, who's more tech savvy than i could ever be, warned me some time back to never buy internal or external drives, SSD or not, larger than 2TB. the higher the capacity, the higher the chance for failure.

i bought a 4TB external drive once. it failed on me within 3 months. told myself i'll never do that again.

of course do what works best for you, but i would stick to 2TB or less.

 

Seagate IronWolf 12 TB - product dimensions 2 x 10 x 15 cm; 600 grams
Seagate IronWolf 01 TB - product dimensions 10.18 x 14.7 x 2.02 cm; 349 grams

As you can see, the magnetic disks are stacked on top of each other.
Thus, a 1 TB hard disk with 2 cm becomes 12 TB with 15 cm.

Of course, all these mechanical parts are much more vulnerable.

 

I'd connect them to my mid 2015 macbook pro through an OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual Mini, an usb 3.1 gen 2 enclosure that can do RAID 0/1 and still work on 3.1 gen1 if powered externally. I talked to the OWC guys for quite some time and we came to the conclusion that without USB-C/TB3 and at the capacities I need (4/8TB total) then this is pretty much my only choice. The enclosure itself is quite cheap (paid 100€ for it on Amazon) but built really well and comes with all the cable and the PSU too. The only disadvantage I can see is that it's a hardware raid instead of a software one so the drives will probably live there forever. Not a deal-breaker, especially if I'm gonna build a hackintosh later and find a TB3/USB-C motherboard. Sure, I'm not getting the best speeds I could be getting, especially on USB 3 but at what point are read speeds fast enough for me to not care? (again, this is just to accommodate all my libraries, eastwest ones in particular AND to use as my only portable storage solution to share between all my devices, hence the need for 8tb)

Out of curiosity I loaded some EW HO Opus sounds from the AWFUL 4tb CC+ drive Thomann gave me (only EU shop I could get it from apparently and it's not the same drive EW would send you if you buy it from them, it's some cheap ass Intenso drive) and even at 35MB/s average loading big sounds didn't take all that long. I'd have liked the infinitely better Buffalo Drivestation DDR that EW gives you but importing it from the US would've costed me way too much in customs fees. I feel like I got scammed by paying 140€ for a terrible drive just to have the libraries shipped to me but with what's going on I would probably pay that much in electricity to keep my machines on for the nearly 3 days of continuous downloading it'd take to download all this stuff lmao.

 

Last edited: May 30, 2022

I have been using 2TB EVO, 4TB QVO, and recently an 8TB QVO for sample libraries. No issues at all. I save all my music and video projects to another 4TB QVO. I backup to a 16TB HDD just incase. Remember, Kontakt and other samplers will utulize 4k random read speed at QD1 levels. So get the cheap drives for samples and premium drives for system and any write-heavy tasks. When I say cheap, I do not mean some unreliable brand. Samsung, PNY, Sandisk, Crucial are among reliable brands.

 

I know nothing about tech and stuff, so what does that 4K random read speed mean?
Is it a total waste to have samples etc. on an SSD? I mean, sometimes my HDD takes a bit of time to open a folder that's a bit deeper structure-wise.

 

There is an app called Crystal DiskMark that will show the various speeds of your drive. If you look at the Amazon review photos of a particular SSD, you'll likely see someone posting a screenshot of Crystal Disk Mark results! The advertised speeds are the "sequential" speeds, usually around 500 MB/s for Sata SSDs and 2,500 MB/s for NVME SSDs. Those speeds apply to initially loading your sounds, both of which are faster than HDD. HOWEVER, sample players like Kontakt, EastWest, Halion, etc use "4K random read" speeds to STREAM your samples from the disk in real time. So the advertised sequential speed means nothing when actually recording/playing. 4k random speed has little difference between NVME and SATA SSDs, so don't spend extra cash on NVME unless you're editing multiple streams of high resolution video or just want a snappy system drive (I use for Win 11 boot drive and feel the difference).

Overall, any reputable brand of SSD is better than HDD for read-heavy tasks like sample streaming, but less so for recording because of lesser write endurance.

So...
QVO drives for kontakt libraires? Yes, best bang for buck.
QVO drives for intense recording of audio tracks? No, I don't recommend it. Get an EVO drive at minimum. My work flow is like 90% midi and 10% audio, so I do take the risk on a QVO drive, but I have a robust backup system to easily recover lost data. Think about that. If I were doing 90% audio, I would either get a Samsung Pro or a 2.5" HDD just for audio projects while keeping the sound libraries on SSD. Its a lot to consider, and I don't want to overcomplicate it, but I've been very particular of how I manage the studio tech,

 

Last edited: Jun 9, 2022

Update: I ended up buying 2x4TB Crucial MX500s. Unfortunately the USB 3.0/3.1 gen 1 spec caps the Mercury Elite Pro Dual Mini's speed at ~450MB/s in both read and write - disappointing but completely expected, 5 Gbps is the theoretical cap. Both Opus and Halion (I wasn't sure how to relocate the Halion content so I transferred it on the RAID then created a symbolic link) have no problems whatsoever and even the biggest Opus sections (eg HWO Full Strings Section) load up in less than 10 seconds total. Loading everything in a pre-purged state would be even faster and it'd save me quite a bit of ram but I prefer loading stuff up entirely and then purge the unnecessary samples.