So i've been looking to replace my normal ssd that I use for my OS with a fast M2 one, my mobo is Asus Prime B350-Plus.

I've been told the Samsung 970 Evo Plus is great (I need the 1 Terabyte version). So my questions is.. is it worth the actual price? I could get it for 160 euros (which corresponds to about 194 dollars), or is there any chance for the price to go down in the somewhat near future?

I've read that it does overheat quite easily, now I have a large and well ventilated case, and have no idea how a m2 SSD behaves with audio stuff. Also because as I understand it, with samsung ssd if you remove the lable to add a Heatsink, you're basically giving up your warranty..

Will my kontakt libraries load faster to ram, compared to using a standard SSD, or is my Ram loading speed the bottleneck?

 

@Olymoon Sorry, I just realized that i posted in the wrong category by mistake, could you please move this to Hardware section? Thanks

 

What up. I don't know about all that overheating and what not but I love mine. I have 2 of them and not a problem yet. Very fast and the other samsung ssd drives I've had all been reliable. I have these M2's paired with 3600 Ram at 32GB and everything loads and runs quick. If you have a large kontakt library you should do the batch resave on the library folder. After that is complete the libraries basically load up instantly.

 

Yes it is. It's reliable and fast. Most of the time you have to choose between reliability and speed when choosing between cheaper SSDs. I have the 2tb version and it has been as perfect as it can be.

 

Installed mine the other day and changed out the thermal paste on by 2015 mbp. It definitely runs faster and is worth it but my temperatures have actually increased from before I changed anything. So not sure if this is the SSD or whether the heatsink needs time to burn in the new paste, however I used AS5 and pretty sure this doesn't require a wear-in, but I digress.
So for me the SSD seems to be the main culprit so far, however I'm going to give it a couple weeks before I conclude anything. Performance-wise though its definitely great and my CPU has seemed to be lower, despite the higher temps

 

in my opinion, it's not worth it,
it's not a bad SSD, you get over 3000MB/s read, compared to over 500MB/s read of any casual SATA SSD,
but if you want to use it just for Kontakt libraries, how much faster you get them loaded? negligible difference unless using HUGE libraries with HUGE samples,

if I were buying drive for Kontakt libraries, I would definitely go for SSD, but I'd literally get cheapest highest capacity, something like 2TB WD Blue costs only about 30% more than 1TB 970 EVO Plus while you get 100% more capacity at still very decent SATA speed,

with Kontakt libraries you don't need any special write speeds or rated lifespan (unless you wipe entire drive every week or so),
you didn't write how much RAM do you have - if it's less than 32GB RAM, then RAM is the bottleneck most likely

 

Thanks for all the replies guys, it's really interesting to know all your opinions. My ram is 16 GB (2x8GB) Corsair vengeance 3200 Mhz (but running at 2933 Mhz bcs I can't get it to run faster with my Ryzen 5 1600 unfortunately). I thought this was a decent Ram.. I hardly need more Ram than this, Only happened with 1 project with loads of Spectrasonics stuff where i could not cut the samples that I didn't need after the arrangement was done and ran out of ram, but I can always flatten the tracks in that case. I also need the SSD for Simulators, With 300 Gigabytes world scenarios content, they gotta load fast, but there my bottleneck is my video card memory (only 4 GB) :D these damn memories of every type cost so much nowadays

 

Oh crap, I didn't read he wanted to use it just for Kontakt libraries. Just get a normal SSD for kontakt libraries, M.2 won't save you that many seconds in this scenario to be honest. Especially if you load huge libraries, because even if 970 Plus has the theoretical max read speed of ~3500Mb/s, it cannot sustain those speeds for very long. Use M.2 for programs, operating system, VST's etc. I have 860 EVO 4TB just for kontakt libraries and they load very fast.

 

Last edited: Feb 12, 2021

As I wrote, not only for kontakt libraries, it's a bit for everything, I just would like everything to be faster and figured this is probs the cheapest thing that might get my PC performances to increase significantly. There's a lot of "slow" loading times when my pc needs to load data from SSD, and while i'm not sure if it's the SSD fault or the Ram (I have no idea what loading speeds a Ram like mine has), it seems logical to get at least 1 m2 sdd in a computer nowadays.

 

@Ozuna baby so how's your PC drives now?
it's probably wise to have one SSD for system, one for Kontakt libraries, maybe another one for active projects and other actively-used data,
M.2 NVME drives are very fast, but there aren't many real world tasks they would really shine at, it's more of a "matter of elegance" since there are no cables and drive is smaller overall - very practical for laptops, but not at all mandatory for desktop PCs,
sure RAM is not that cheap, especially at price per gigabyte (compared to drives) but how can you tell 16GB ram is more than enough when operating system would dynamically allocate more available RAM - I do think 32GB ram is decent sweetspot for all-round versatile use - your motherboard has 4 ram slots, so you can easily upgrade to 4x8GB which is worth it imo

 

get the samsung 980 pro 1tb m.2 nvme its fast, but not many motherboards are supporting pcie4 right now, 7000 is the advertised read write speeds, but on a pci43 board i get 3520 read and 3403 write speeds, still over 3.5 the speeds of a normal ssd

 

No because my pc works faster with 2 ram slots occupied. The processor and board only support dual channel configurations
Here's an example,

even tho it's comparing the same ram capacity, you can clearly see the difference in fps (Meaning difference in performances, because ryzen architecture makes processor speed very much correlated to ram frequency)
And here these guys takin bout their specs in reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/GAAB350/comments/gfj3vw/using_4_ram_sticks_with_ryzen_1600/
Going down from 2933 Mhz ram speed to 2400 Mhz or less would defo do more harm than good. Unfortunately i bought this first ryzen generation that had lots of problems with ram compatibility etc, but at the time it was the best bang for my bucks.

I have 1 500 Gb crucial SSD for my OS and for some kontakt libraries, and a normal old hard disk for storage and some other less used kontakt libraries. I know, not the best...
I just opened this threat to ask about m2 ssd because I think it's quite hard to choose the right ssd nowadays, there's so many models and versions and the prices also are very different. For example even from the same manufacturer, Samsung makes the 970 Evo 1 TB available for 130 euros, and I'm wondering would there be much difference between the Evo and Evo plus? is that difference worth 30 euros?
Then there's the Western Digital with proper heatsinks already installed so you don't lose the warranty to install a 3rd party one.. a lot of options and I know very little about which one is worth getting.

I think my mobo does not support PCIe 4.0, unfortunately, and for 229 euros (which is the price of the 980 Pro 1TB) there's no way that I would buy it, even if I could use it :D

 

NVME is the same price than SSD now
When you CAN use NVME ... DO IT !!!

Read the Kontakt official tips too

Check last offers to select the right NVME.
I personally use two SX8200 pro

 

Yeah in theory with a processor upgrade I would be able to fix most ram compatibility issues, but I figured this CPU is more than enough for me at the moment, and the smart choice would be to wait a few years to get new CPU+new Mobo because the improvements every year on CPUs are massive. But a good M2 SSD will be great to have also in my future new PC, so it would not be a purchase "of the past".
By the way @taskforce great post, very detailed, well written and informative!

 

It is one of the best and you do not need to remove the label.
https://www.hwcooling.net/en/should-you-remove-an-ssd-sticker-before-mounting-a-heatsink/

 

I cant see a better section to speak about a Hard drive...

 

I'm a huge fan of NVME drives, but will just echo the sentiment that it doesn't really make a difference for Kontakt library load times. I do know you have other uses for it, as you noted and you'll notice a big difference with other day to day stuff though. The 970 Evo Plus is better than what I have, but I've done tests with loading Kontakt libraries, using Samsung Evo 960 (NVME) vs a Samsung 840 Pro (Sata SSD) in Kontakt. The load times were pretty close to the same. Speaking of Kontakt, I am going to need to find me a new BIG drive (probably Sata SSD) for that, as mine is pretty full now.


Edit: Please ignore the above.. as Ozuna noted in a link.. the libraries load in the same time, but samples from the libraries load differently.

 

Last edited: Feb 12, 2021

I don’t use kontakt but I can vouch for the 970 evo plus. I have a 2TB one for samples, DAW projects, games etc. It works beautifully. I just ordered another one to replace my boot drive, which was an older SSD with a SATA connection. I can’t definitively tell you the evo feels much faster or anything, as I use the two drives for different things. But IMO if you can afford a bit extra for nvme, you may as well.

 

Wherever you see fit

I have found this post in this website, this guy tested Kontakt v5.73 loading speeds with 1TB NVMe Samsung 960 Pro vs 2TB Sata Samsung 850 Evo. While we're talking about a 2 years old test, it looks really well done to me.
-Here's the short conclusions from this guy's test: https://vi-control.net/community/threads/nvme-vs-sata-will-it-make-kontakt-faster.69572/
-Here the longer document detailing everything: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wL8XYGgd_O9fomMrK1EpSnZJeQwhVOAn91e82byj8s4/edit