So, I just bought a Yottamaster external dual 2.5" enclosure that is USB 3.1 Gen2 type C, is RAID compatible and cites support of up to 10Gbps.

However, I've just put two Crucial MX500 4TB SSDs in it and set up in RAID 0, hoping to get 8TB of speedy external SSD performance, ready to use as my Kontakt workhorse. With each SSD having write speed up to 560MB/s, and being set up in RAID 0, I was hoping for some speedy performance.

However, I've just started transferring my Kontakt libraries onto the drive and the libraries are writing to the drive at 5-20 MB/s, meaning copying just 500GB is gonna take several hours at that rate. Does this seem normal?! Is there any way to improve this or speed it up?!

Here's a grab of what it was currently reporting in Windows.

 

First of all the external dual enclosure is kinda useless especially in this situation, all you need is two seperate 2.5 usb3 enclosure like THIS one

Spoiler: Image

second, make sure that you're using an usb Port with the right speed, download USB Device Tree Viewer from THIS link and make sure the hub/port says SuperSpeed.

Spoiler: Image

Lastely, this could be normal behaviour if you plan on putting alot of data in at the same time, this could happen when the "cache" is full and needs a couple minutes to go back to normal speed.

 

Ok, thanks for the reply, but as I have what I have, there's not much use in pointing to other things. The enclosure I have was purchased because I needed 8TB of SSD storage and my laptop only has one USB 3.1 Gen2 port, with the others being USB 3.0, so thought and planning has already gone into purchasing what I have in terms of getting the max SSD storage available on the fastest port available on my laptop.

I think the cache is a factor, but the above photo is on the faster side of things according to Windows' progress reporting, with the slower side saying it's gonna take 22 hours (assumed to be misrepresentation when cache is full etc).

 

Everything @MrLyannMusic said plus:

Every RAID config has some overhead.
RAID 0 speeds up read access but not write access because when a file has to be written the software (mostly, sometime the hardware) has to split up the files into chunks and write them to the disks in stripes. This means you don't write the original content to disk but something else and that takes time.
Moreover big counts of small files always take much more time than reading. If you have filled the cache you get a feeling of how slow that really is

So, take in accout that RAID 0 is great for reading but not so grreat for writing. As long as rading is you goal (e.g. Kontakt libs) that'll be what you want.
Otherwise (quite equal r/w) two normal disks may be the better solution (also configured as JBOD if you would like one big disk).

p.s.: If you use RAID 0 be especially careful when unplugging the HDDs, because the RAID will take it especially over you if the power fails during a write operation.

 

Last edited: Dec 22, 2022

I get that planning has gone into this, if the 3.1 gen2 Port is USB C, you could have always went with a dock, anyway try to disable the raid, there is no need of that.

@twoheart you beat me to it lol

just before i forget, USB 3.0 is enough to handle a 2.5 SSD speed.

 

If I disable RAID 0 and just go JBOD though, won't it then be seen as 2 disks? I would ideally want it to be seen as a single disk in WIndows as I have the content backed up on an 8TB mechanical drive (that is too slow for Kontakt library reads).

 

I just did an exact copy job, about 500gig of samples to an external usb-c fast hdd. Exact same amount of time as what your task is displaying. The number of files (not just bulk size) GREATLY increases the amount of time this will take. If you want to see how # of files being copied affects the time required for this, compare a copy job of some huge # of midi files. They take forever, and yet are such small amounts of data each! Samples are nearly as bad.

Your real world transfer speeds are almost always dictated by some throughput bottleneck and not your CPU. In this case, it's got a lot to do with the number of files; it isn't just transferring. It is read, allocate, create new file, transfer data disk operations; over and over.

my example is my Mac, btw. They all do this.

 

Last edited: Dec 22, 2022

Disable RAID, re format both drives to NTFS, you can use Kontakt libraries on more than one drive.

 

I know I can use them on multiple drives, I'd just prefer to use on a single drive. I have them all installed on a currently mechanical drive, which is too slow to load. My intention is to transfer to new RAID 0 drive, and after transfer rename the RAID drives and change letters to what the mechanical used to be. This will mean everything transfers and is picked up seamlessly. Otherwise, I have to relocate all libraries etc if I split across drives.

 

In this case no, it should be a spanned single volume, but I don't think that it will affect the data rates significantly.

Try some quick benchmark (like CrystalDiskMark) to check the sequential throughput.

 

So, just tried this. Set to SPAN (instead of RAID0), reformatted, and these were the numbers when connected to the USB A 3.1 Gen1 port on my laptop. I did try a run before changing from RAID0 too, and the read wat about 50MB/s higher, but write was similar to the below:



When I connect to the USB C 3.1 Gen1 port on my laaptop, I get these reading off the same drive when set as SPAN:



Is there anything to gain over this by going RAID0? Or is SPAN and connecting to the type C port the fastest realistic solution for read and write?

 

Last edited: Dec 22, 2022

yes this is perfectly normal,
don't be fooled by advertised speeds which are measured when transfering HUGE files,

you're copying 376 000 files, if it takes 7 hours, then it's still around 15 files per second, given the fact Windows is most likely indexing shit and Antivirus is scanning every shit on its own, it's surprisingly fast imo;

in situations like this, I usually compress stuff into archives (at no compression ratio), copy it MUCH faster, and then extract it at target location, it's always much faster overall

 

+1
This would be kind of the same but even better in your situation, copying Kontakt libs: to put all the individual .ncw,.wav samples in .nkx containers.

 

TIP: use multithreaded Robocopy instead of regular Windows Explorer copy for large file xfers. Way, way faster and more reliable.

 

so, what would be the best solution for Kontakt libraries, external o internal? RAID or not RAID? thank you.

 

The term 'best' always leads us all up the garden path a bit, so can we agree that 'best' refers only to the needs for Kontakt? Video e.g. or heavy Audio write ops of small files is a completely different issue.

I've tried most of what is possible (with a tolerable amount of money) for HDD and SSD when it comes to store Kontakt libs.

Spoiler: Different setups for Kontakt libs.

1. Kontakt libs on a NAS with a 10GBit LAN containing cheap SSDs in a RAID5 configuration. Read Write of big files with ~800 MB/s:
Reliable, fast and easily scalable. So, ATM the 'best' solution I found for (mostly) Read applications.
(I can use cheap Samsung QVO SSD because I use the Kontakt libs, once written to disk remain mostly unchanged over time. For frequently rewritten files a QVO would be a bad decision). I use it a year now, so I can't tell about the long term reliability.
Theoretically, however, I don't expect any problems within the next 5 to 8 years if I put my average writeOps in relation to the TBW of the QVO drives. Beyond that, I keep two SSDs in reserve.
2. Plain SSD drives, no RAID. (fast R/W but I hate using a bunch of SSD in all of my USB ports.
3. HDD RAID 5 in a NAS 1Gb LAN (not so fast and not very rilable. I don't use HDD any more because of too much broken drives compared to SSD), ~ 110 MB/s for big files.

I find RAID 0 in most cases a bad decision because if one drive in The RAID (RAID consisting of m drives) ist broken all data will be lost (so you'll need a full backup of the RAID that is n=m) while if you use RAID 5 you can lose at least one drive and nevertheless reconstruct the RAID on the fly (but consider to always have a spare drive at hand (n>=1).

 

Last edited: Dec 24, 2022

dedicated internal NVME (PCIe 4.0) SSD, something like Kingston SSD KC3000 (2TB or 4TB),
IF you work with libraries daily, and IF you have your OS+programs on primary NVME SSD already