Aymara
Member
My current Thunderbolt NVME is around 5x faster than my old Thunderbolt 2 SATA SSD (LaCie Rugged).
NVME and SSD Speeds on Mac Studio M1 Ultra (Empirical Data)
- Thread starter Ray Toler
- Start date
TR909sample
Active Member
Mine too, but he was talking about dual enclosures, which splits the bandwidth in half.
A single full bandwidth enclosure will give somebody 5-6 X the speed of a SATA SSD.
jbuhler
Senior Member
Yes, if I had a faster enclosure, the differential would be higher. But reread what I wrote: the enclosure is capped at around 1500 because it is a dual enclosure. So I could get faster by going with single enclosures, and the question becomes how many drive cables you want coming out of your computer and/or hubs.
OP
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Ray Toler
Active Member
For those who are interested in the specific model, I'm using the OWC 11-Port Thunderbolt Dock. The last two days have been all software installation (and cursing Native Instruments fairly frequently) and when I've checked the Acasis enclosures, none of them are uncomfortably hot.
When I've gone into my DAW to authorize or jump through other DRM hoops, I've been stealing the opportunity to play a bit and the speed difference is simply amazing. Omnisphere patch surfing is instantaneous. I've only been able to play with a couple of Kontakt libraries, but they have been similarly zippy.
One final "huh." moment: I'm using one of my old SSDs (2TB 870 EVO) in a cheap Sabrent USB 3 enclosure ($10) as my Time Machine disk. When I did my speed tests, I hooked it up to the OWC dock and directly to the Mac Studio and got Write/Read speeds of 273/300 and 362/303 respectively. For my final layout, though, I needed to hook it up via an older Anker USB hub, figuring the speed hit wouldn't bother me much on a backup drive.
Anker Hub --> OWC Hub --> Mac Studio hookup tested consistently around 420 write /360 read. No idea why it's faster, but I'm not going to question it any further.
When I've gone into my DAW to authorize or jump through other DRM hoops, I've been stealing the opportunity to play a bit and the speed difference is simply amazing. Omnisphere patch surfing is instantaneous. I've only been able to play with a couple of Kontakt libraries, but they have been similarly zippy.
One final "huh." moment: I'm using one of my old SSDs (2TB 870 EVO) in a cheap Sabrent USB 3 enclosure ($10) as my Time Machine disk. When I did my speed tests, I hooked it up to the OWC dock and directly to the Mac Studio and got Write/Read speeds of 273/300 and 362/303 respectively. For my final layout, though, I needed to hook it up via an older Anker USB hub, figuring the speed hit wouldn't bother me much on a backup drive.
Anker Hub --> OWC Hub --> Mac Studio hookup tested consistently around 420 write /360 read. No idea why it's faster, but I'm not going to question it any further.
Simon Ravn
Senior Member
OK? So which OWC dock is it? I don't see any mention of it.
EDIT: Ray just answered my question. It wasn't mentioned in the opening post...
Simon Ravn
Senior Member
THANK YOU.... that clears it up
Has this dock been rock solid? No disconnects/no flickering displays (if you use it for displays) or anything?
Guy Rowland
Senior Member
Do you notice any difference in music work?
I think it makes sense for a boot drive to be as fast as possible, but AFAIK the performance of Kontakt in particular doesn't change much, if at all. So some of this discussion seems a little academic.
Aymara
Member
Sure, the loading of Studio One songs (or DAW projects in general) is much faster as with a slow SSD. Also adding a new sample based instrument is faster.
I have all my sample libraries on the external SSD.
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Ray Toler
Active Member
It has been solid for me. I’m using it to drive two monitors, but each has its own USB-C port because MacOS doesn’t do MST daisy chaining (they’re 4k Dell monitors).THANK YOU.... that clears it up
Has this dock been rock solid? No disconnects/no flickering displays (if you use it for displays) or anything?
I also have two USB hubs, a backup drive, and my midi interfaces going through it with no issues.
jbuhler
Senior Member
It makes a difference for loading projects, instruments, large templates, etc. But I find no difference at all for streaming samples from SSDs. For streaming samples, SATA SSDs running over USB3 work just as well as NVMes running through TB4. Some of my projects take more than 10 minutes to load with SATA SSDs over TB3, with my dual enclosure NVMe, they take 3-4 minutes. I imagine if I had the NVMes in a TB4 enclosure that could capture the full speed, it would be closer to 2 minutes. Does that speed matter? I imagine that depends very much on the person.
octave music
Member
With a 3000 MB/s drive, you can for instance, INSTANTLY play the presets in Omnisphere as you toggle from one to the next. When you double click on a Preset in Spitfire BBCSymphonic Orchestra PRO, the entire 400MB sound is ready to play by the time you get your hands from the mouse button to your MIDI keyboard. No glitches, no missing notes. Double Click on a Full Drumset in NI Komplete and the whole drumset including the cymbals is loaded in under one second. If you have your Kontakt instances purged in VEPro, when you select that midi track in your DAW and start playing a melody, or whatever, there aren't the glitches that are there with an SSD drive as it quickly loads the smaples for the notes you are playing. All of those things for me, are actually more fantastic, and more appreciated then any improvement in loading times of sessions etc. It's like having a hardware synth where the sounds play the moment you switch from one preset to another.
Guy Rowland
Senior Member
I did a few tests here on the M2 macbook air and my Ryzen 9 - interesting actually.
The M2's speed according to Black Magic is around 3000. The Ryzen 9's C drive (Crucial T500) is 7500. One sample drive E is a 4TB NVMe (Crucial P3), and that benches 3500. However, the Black Magic only returns one test result, which I think is CrystalDiskMark's SEQ1M Q8T1. Some wild variations in the other tests:
(my other drives are regular SSDs for samples, and rust drives for projects)
In the real world, my C drive seems very fast, I boot in a fraction of the time I did. Cubase projects are loading at about twice the speed. However like jbuhler above, I'm not sure there's a lot of difference in Kontakt load times or streaming samples. Omnisphere isn't instant as you find, but it is massively quicker - though part of that is that my old rig had the Omnisphere slow GUI bug that plagued some Windows users that they only recently just fixed.
Interestingly, Spectrasonics support said tests 2 and 4 are the most important for their software. Given the colossal difference in test 2, it might be worth be experimenting putting some stuff on my C drive (it's 2TB so quite a bit of room to spare). I think the days of keeping program and sample drives separate are gone, right? That said, performance is now very good, light years above what it was, so why rock the boat.
EDIT - apologies as I seem to have dragged the thread a little off topic, but where there is an overlap is in knowing what tests to run and how to interpret them.
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Guy Rowland
Senior Member
...as an addendum to the above, as an experiement I moved my STEAM folder from E to C drive. Result - fully loading the largest patch (the 20gb C7 Grand Piano) dropped from 40s to 10s. Wow.
