Sample streaming drives

Before getting stuck into a wholesale upgrade, I'd suggest just seeing how you get on with the adapter. It should work fine. I have the later 10G which is fine with an M2 Ultra and is a regular USB-C/TB3 connection. The only issue I've encountered is that the Blackmagic controller doesn't play nice with the Crucial MX500 controller (pop the Crucial into a cheap UGreen box and it works fine). Samsung's however are rock solid.

But I was using the TB3->TB2->Firewire lashup to an RME interface on the previous machine and that worked perfectly well even if it looked a bit weird round the back.

I'd maybe have a look at the Blackmagic forums to see if anyone's had trouble with the adapter approach but I would expect it to work fine, given the electrical signals are basically the same and the host chip will recognise it's a TB2 at the other end.

This thread indicates that the NVME/M.2 setups are overall significantly faster than SATA through USB-C. But there is the question of whether you will see that reflected in real-world improvements. I've found the Blackmagic speed test to not be an accurate indicator of sample streaming performance – it was created by a video company after all. The Crucial, for example, looks fine on all those tests if a little slower than a Samsung QVO. But it craps out on sample engines at low pre-load settings whereas the Samsungs just keep going.

If streaming works fine on the system you have, you might as well stick with it as, though flash densities and performance might plateau for a few years and so lead to less depreciation in per-TB prices, the most future-proof thing to do is wait for the future.

Thanks for your reply Gamma, that's much appreciated.

I was doing some research yesterday and I get the impression that if you are predominantly using Kontakt, then steaming samples from nvme is pretty much the same as from SSD, even though the read speeds are significantly higher on paper.

I don't understand why this is, but as you said it makes sense to continue with the Blackmagic Multidock setup and see how I get on!

I'm not even really sure what the bottle neck is with streaming from external discs - for example how many instruments would I be able to stream, without running into problems, from an 8Tb nvme drive in an OWC Express TB4 enclosure compared to my set up with 4 x 2tb drives in a black magic thunderbolt 2 multi-dock?

Hejira said:

Thanks for your reply Gamma, that's much appreciated.

I was doing some research yesterday and I get the impression that if you are predominantly using Kontakt, then steaming samples from nvme is pretty much the same as from SSD, even though the read speeds are significantly higher on paper.

I don't understand why this is, but as you said it makes sense to continue with the Blackmagic Multidock setup and see how I get on!

I'm not even really sure what the bottle neck is with streaming from external discs - for example how many instruments would I be able to stream, without running into problems, from an 8Tb nvme drive in an OWC Express TB4 enclosure compared to my set up with 4 x 2tb drives in a black magic thunderbolt 2 multi-dock?

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I’d like to have a better handle on this as well. I can say that in my experience you can have issues streaming over USB3 if you have too many libraries on the same drive all streaming at the same time. But I’ve not been able to produce similar problems with SATA disks running in TB2 or TB3 enclosures. So the speed bump from USB3 to TB2 seems sufficient to handle the streaming load up to at least the libraries I can comfortably load into 128GB of RAM.

My intuition tells me that what matters is not the size of the SSD but what can be loaded into RAM, or rather that NVMe speeds, even SATA TB2 speeds are fast enough that you run out of RAM before you run out of bandwidth on the TB channel. Now that I have 192GB of RAM and still have a lot of sample libraries on SATA SSDs I should be able to test this intuition somewhat, or at least learn whether the SATA TB2 speeds are fast enough to stream samples when I’ve loaded 192GB of RAM to capacity with libraries.