Quick question for storage in nMP (for musician)

[deconstruct60]

..... I would stand by my recommendation that the ultimate solution for BYOD SSDs is the Pegasus2 R4 diskless.

Right now the Pegasus2 is the only TB v2 solution shipping. It is bit premature to declare it "king of the lab" when it comes to being a BYOD solution. Post CES 2014 in a couple of weeks, it won't be surprising to see it loose that 'crown'.

EDIT: Adding the J4 to the list of options you end up with... (you can see the bang for the buck is not great)...


4x 1TB SSDs in Pegasus2 R4 costs $3000 and provides 2000 MB/s (theoretical ~ 1500MB/s actual?)
4x 1TB SSDs in Promise J4 costs $2700 and provides 750 MB/s

The sag here in bang for the buck (from a capacity perspective) is far more the 1TB SSDs than the enclosures.

Nor does a JBOD require a uniform set of drives. For example

1TB everything and kitchen sink Vienna samples
512GB product A samples
512GB product B samples
256GB product C samples

would probably work just as well and cost substantially less. If don't have a Product B or C samples can use the empty drive slots much like the empty drive sleds are eventually used on the classic Mac Pros over time. ( archives, other apps, Time machine target , etc. )

2x 2TB WD VR Duos costs $1100 and provides 700 MB/s
1x 4TB WD TB Duo costs $500 and provides 230 MB/s

These aren't relatively huge samples that are being randomly pulled. If concerned about latency between selected and loaded samples isn't going to be as big of a deal than IOP/s.


P.S. this page sugges that Vienna Symphony (kitchen sink) collection is in the 550GB range...

".. The Symphonic Cube is the flagship of the Vienna Symphonic Library, including 10 DVD Collections and 550 GB of sampled material ... "
http://www.steinberg.net/en/products/partner_products/pluginzone/vienna_symphonic_library.html

If it is around 1TB of data don't need 4TB of storage to make that work. Old rules of thumb about "short shroking" HDDs so only use a smaller fraction of their capacity to get access speed increases go out the window with SSDs. Filling SSDs completely up to capacity isn't all that great either but not anywhere near how 'empty' have to leave HDDs to significantly boost average random access times.

 

[VirtualRain]

Right now the Pegasus2 is the only TB v2 solution shipping. It is bit premature to declare it "king of the lab" when it comes to being a BYOD solution. Post CES 2014 in a couple of weeks, it won't be surprising to see it loose that 'crown'.



The sag here in bang for the buck (from a capacity perspective) is far more the 1TB SSDs than the enclosures.

Nor does a JBOD require a uniform set of drives. For example

1TB everything and kitchen sink Vienna samples
512GB product A samples
512GB product B samples
256GB product C samples

would probably work just as well and cost substantially less. If don't have a Product B or C samples can use the empty drive slots much like the empty drive sleds are eventually used on the classic Mac Pros over time. ( archives, other apps, Time machine target , etc. )








These aren't relatively huge samples that are being randomly pulled. If concerned about latency between selected and loaded samples isn't going to be as big of a deal than IOP/s.


P.S. this page sugges that Vienna Symphony (kitchen sink) collection is in the 550GB range...

".. The Symphonic Cube is the flagship of the Vienna Symphonic Library, including 10 DVD Collections and 550 GB of sampled material ... "
http://www.steinberg.net/en/products/partner_products/pluginzone/vienna_symphonic_library.html

If it is around 1TB of data don't need 4TB of storage to make that work. Old rules of thumb about "short shroking" HDDs so only use a smaller fraction of their capacity to get access speed increases go out the window with SSDs. Filling SSDs completely up to capacity isn't all that great either but not anywhere near how 'empty' have to leave HDDs to significantly boost average random access times.

I'm sorry, but you're not making much sense...

Hopefully others can see through the nonsense here but in short, the only shipping BYOD TB2 solution would qualify it as the best BYOD TB2 solution. The poor bang for the buck in relation to the J4 is primarily the result of the cost of the enclosure and poor performance with HDs, not the price of the HDs. and lastly the OP asked for 4TB of storage not 550GB, hence the options I presented are all 4TB in capacity.

 

[FredT2]

The question I have in this discussion is how much of a benefit the speeds of SSD and/or RAID make for this application. I bring up the example of Adobe Lightroom, where SSD apparently makes no difference in speeding up how the program performs in normal use.

 

[VirtualRain]

The question I have in this discussion is how much of a benefit the speeds of SSD and/or RAID make for this application. I bring up the example of Adobe Lightroom, where SSD apparently makes no difference in speeding up how the program performs in normal use.

I'm no audio guy, but I can say there's not a workflow on the planet that probably won't benefit from SSDs. If you're running apps, loading files, or saving them (and who isn't?), SSDs are great.

Especially, if you're dealing with lots of objects being loaded in/out of project files or libraries, SSDs are a gift from heaven... and this is one type of I/O I think audio work depends heavily on.

Audio experts?

 

[FredT2]

Here is a review of the WD Velociraptor Duo TB

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6216/western-digital-my-book-velociraptor-duo-review

Here is another review of the normal WD Duo TB that you should read

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5797/...lex-desk-and-western-digitals-thunderbolt-duo

Thanks for those links. Here is another product not yet on the market that looks very interesting:

http://www.caldigit.com/T3/?utm_sou...igit+T3+Pre-Order&utm_term=TS_2520Site_03_png

 

[cinealta]

...I went with the Blackmagic Multidock. It is SATA II internal so tops out on single disk SSD reads of 380MB/s.

The irony is that for the audio engineer, a 3.33 6-core cMP with $60 SSD-PCIe card (800 Mb/s), will actually outperform a 3.7 4-core nMP with thunderbolt Blackmagic Multidock for >$1,000 less.

 

[propower]

I do music but not heavy orchestral stuff ---

It is my understanding though... With sample libraries it is not unreasonable to have tens of gigabytes loaded in for a project. In the best case these all go to RAM and your good. For those without enough RAM these must be streamed from disk which takes fast access. Now a 1TB SSD can certainly deliver 500MB/s kind of performance and is an amazing streaming device. For those loading projects with 30GB of samples into RAM at 100MB/s - 6GB/m it takes 5 minutes - not so much fun. At 500MB/s 30GB/m - less than a minute - much more fun. Faster than that is even more fun but it will cost $$$.... My projects are small and at most have ~5GB sample library and a few GB timeline cache. - loads in less than 10 seconds which is fine for me... Changing a drum set in a VI takes a few seconds to load...

In a music project though - once your loaded it should be smooth sailing. If it were me I would make sure I never run out of RAM first...

 

[propower]

deleted

 

[deconstruct60]

I'm sorry, but you're not making much sense...

Hopefully others can see through the nonsense here but in short, the only shipping BYOD TB2 solution would qualify it as the best BYOD TB2 solution.

The only shipping solution isn't being compared against it cohorts, so it is premature. The only nonsense here is the misdirection.

The "first to market" solution is extremely rarely the best $/prefomance option. TB v2 controllers aren't due for volume production until 2014. Straight from Intel slides

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7049/intel-thunderbolt-2-everything-you-need-to-know

The volume devices are going to appear in 2014 when the parts are available. The nonsense is that they are arriving before the parts are available.

The poor bang for the buck in relation to the J4 is primarily the result of the cost of the enclosure and poor performance with HDs, not the price of the HDs.

Cow manure. The four devices are normalized to 4TB. It is the cost of buying 4TB of capacity that is primary driver of the prices. The enclosures are almost noise in relation once jump to highly expensive Flash storage. $0.50/GB (or higher ) vs $0.05/GB (or lower ) is going to be a dominating order of magnitude difference factor.

and lastly the OP asked for 4TB of storage not 550GB, hence the options I presented are all 4TB in capacity.

The capacity is the dominating, and largely unmotivated, issue. Not the GB/s drag racing speeds. All it is doing is dragging the pricing into the swamp.

Depending upon the regularity of sample selections, a Fusion set up would likely deliver a much higher bang-for-the buck once get past the colossal kitchen sink sampling library issue.

The user objective was

I really just want my sample libraries (orchestral instruments) to load fast.

What you are trying to spin this into is maximum largest GB/s. First, in a colossal pile of stuff 4TB latency of even getting the found and starting to load is an issue in "load fast". Second, "fast" is different from "fastest".

J4 in a RAID 0 with 1TB SSDs isn't the best $/bandwidth ratio but there is little here to motivate why need a four stripe SSD RAID 0 solution or four 1TB SSD drives. If a mix of HDD and SSD comes into play it is going effective.

 

[VirtualRain]

The only nonsense here is the misdirection...

<case in point>

Nothing more to say.

 

[dkmooers]

aLfR3dd, I'm running Hollywood Strings Diamond and Hollywood Brass Diamond as well as Berlin Woodwinds, along with Omnisphere/Kontakt stuff. I'm deciding on which nMP to get, like you, and have been thinking on storage options.

AFAIK, when using PLAY, there's no way to get all samples loaded into RAM, so you really want the fastest random read speeds you can get. SSDs are absolutely the way to go for libraries like Hollywood Strings. You're not only going to be concerned with load times, but rather massive parallel streaming performance while making big orchestral tracks.

Everyone's saying get a RAID... but doesn't make sense in your situation.

Why not get a couple of these?

http://oyendigital.com/hard-drives/store/TNN-SSD-512-SL.html

That gives you around ~500MB/s of read performance. Two of 'em gives you 1,000MB/s, no RAID required.

Spread out your libraries over a couple of them. Put the strings and woodwinds on one drive, and the brass / percussion / Omnisphere / etc. on the other, or however you want to do it.

You have 6 Thunderbolt ports on the nMP, so you could get a whole bunch of these drives if you need to expand later with bigger libraries (inevitable). Easy!

Alternatively, get something like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Akitio-Neutri...387463402&sr=1-8&keywords=512+thunderbolt+ssd

A little more expensive, but now you've got RAID 0 SSD's. Haven't seen any tests on that particular one but I bet it's more like 700MB/s read. Could get two of those for screaming read speeds. You don't need Thunderbolt 2, because you'd still wouldn't be brushing the theoretical 1,250 MB/s of TB1.

Smaller, contained SSDs, rather than RAIDs, are the way to go for sample libraries IMO. Distributes the load better, takes advantage of having multiple TB ports.

Back up all your sample drives to one big spinny disk drive for safety and you're good to go.

(EDIT: depending on your library size, the second option (RAID 0) doesn't make sense b/c you'll be getting ~700 MB/s, whereas if you just got 2x 256GB version of the first option for a similar price, each plugged into its own TB port, you'd be spreading the load better. Initial template load might not be as fast but real-time performance would be better, methinks.)

 

[theSeb]

http://oyendigital.com/hard-drives/store/TNN-SSD-512-SL.html

That gives you around ~500MB/s of read performance. Two of 'em gives you 1,000MB/s, no RAID required.

Please explain? The only way to get this magical increase in performance is by using two of those in RAID. How is RAID not required?

 

[dkmooers]

Sorry, I could have been clearer about that. I'm speaking hypothetically. With large orchestral templates, you can stream samples from multiple different drives at the same time, getting the additive full read performance of each drive. Two SSDs in a RAID will never be as fast as two separate SSDs with their own controllers.

 

[theSeb]

Sorry, I could have been clearer about that. I'm speaking hypothetically. With large orchestral templates, you can stream samples from multiple different drives at the same time, getting the additive full read performance of each drive. Two SSDs in a RAID will never be as fast as two separate SSDs with their own controllers.

That would assume that the application creates threads to load samples from each drive, as opposed to in a more sequential manner.

 

[dkmooers]

Solid point... not sure how PLAY handles streaming from multiple drives. I would guess it's parallel, but might not be?

 

[aLfR3dd]

Solid point... not sure how PLAY handles streaming from multiple drives. I would guess it's parallel, but might not be?

So I bought 4 SSDs (1tb each). You are suggesting not to put them in 1 enclosure and do RAID0 but separate each of them in different enclosures? Would it ok to have the drives in one single enclosure without RAID or you think it's still better to use different TB ports?

If no, do you know of any single TB enclosure for the SDDs I bought? I do hear often that it's better to spread libraries across different drives

Thanks!

 

[VirtualRain]

So I bought 4 SSDs (1tb each). You are suggesting not to put them in 1 enclosure and do RAID0 but separate each of them in different enclosures? Would it ok to have the drives in one single enclosure without RAID or you think it's still better to use different TB ports?

If no, do you know of any single TB enclosure for the SDDs I bought? I do hear often that it's better to spread libraries across different drives

Thanks!

Wow... nice. You have a few choices. But I think that advice of spreading libraries across different drives may be old-school thinking that applies to HDs... not SSDs. SSDs don't suffer from the random I/O and seek issues that throttled HDs from handling multiple I/O requests at the same time. A single SSD or RAID0 of multiple SSDs can handle a ton more IOPs than any set of HDs.

1. Pegasus2 R4 Diskless - You must run them in RAID... it doesn't support JBOD. You will get extremely fast performance... probably approaching 1500MB/s.
2. Oyen Digital DaleTale or Pegasus J4 - These will support JBOD allowing you to run independent disks if you like, or RAID0 (with disk utility) but in either case performance may be limiting... 750MB/s tops in RAID0
3. Separate enclosures (Like the Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt... and there may be other similar products out there) - The problem with this is you use up a lot of your TB ports and it's messy (and the GoFlex seems to have some troubling reviews).

 

[dkmooers]

I'm not really sure, after what theSeb mentioned. It might be better to RAID them, b/c I'm not sure if Logic or whatever DAW you're using, or PLAY itself, can load from multiple drives at the same time. Don't know enough about it to give a good recommendation.

Options are limited for TB enclosures:

http://www.amazon.com/Akitio-Neutrino-Thunder-Enclosure-Only/dp/B00EZVCMP6

Can't vouch for the quality. Sounds like a loud fan. Also seems to get quite hot with two 960GB drives in it:
http://www.storage-switzerland.com/...1_Akitio_Neutrino_Thunder_Duo_Test_Drive.html

Still trying to figure what I'm going to do for sample libs. I already have some SSDs but may just sell them and get pre-built ones like the MiniPro from Oyen Digital, unless a good enclosure comes out soon. CES might see some new offerings in the TB department.

Seriously? 4TB of SSDs?! How many/which libraries are you running? I could fit all of mine on one of those SSDs!

----------

And actually, if you can't find a good 2-bay or 1-bay enclosure, your best bet is probably the Pegasus2 R4 with TB2:

http://store.apple.com/us/product/H...s2-r4-diskless-4bay-thunderbolt-2-raid-system

Could just jam all 4 drives in there. With TB2 you theoretically get 2500MB/s to play with, so four fast SSDs will probably saturate it nicely. Then you can maybe play with RAID 0 or similar for increased read speeds. But maybe you don't even need the RAID. Reliability will be better if you don't use it.

----------

Ah, apparently you can't JBOD with the R4. RAID it is!

And yep, that's what I'm starting to think too - lump them all together. Back up your stuff though! If you're running RAID 0 and one fails, yikes.

Or is there a better option than RAID 0 for this application?

 

[aLfR3dd]

I'm not really sure, after what theSeb mentioned. It might be better to RAID them, b/c I'm not sure if Logic or whatever DAW you're using, or PLAY itself, can load from multiple drives at the same time. Don't know enough about it to give a good recommendation.

Options are limited for TB enclosures:

http://www.amazon.com/Akitio-Neutrino-Thunder-Enclosure-Only/dp/B00EZVCMP6

Can't vouch for the quality. Sounds like a loud fan. Also seems to get quite hot with two 960GB drives in it:
http://www.storage-switzerland.com/...1_Akitio_Neutrino_Thunder_Duo_Test_Drive.html

Still trying to figure what I'm going to do for sample libs. I already have some SSDs but may just sell them and get pre-built ones like the MiniPro from Oyen Digital, unless a good enclosure comes out soon. CES might see some new offerings in the TB department.

Seriously? 4TB of SSDs?! How many/which libraries are you running? I could fit all of mine on one of those SSDs!

----------

And actually, if you can't find a good 2-bay or 1-bay enclosure, your best bet is probably the Pegasus2 R4 with TB2:

http://store.apple.com/us/product/H...s2-r4-diskless-4bay-thunderbolt-2-raid-system

Could just jam all 4 drives in there. With TB2 you theoretically get 2500MB/s to play with, so four fast SSDs will probably saturate it nicely. Then you can maybe play with RAID 0 or similar for increased read speeds. But maybe you don't even need the RAID. Reliability will be better if you don't use it.

Thank you VirtualRain, dkmooers and everyone else. Yes I have a lot of sample libraries (currently about 2.5gb of data) so I need that space.

I'm still unsure whether if I should RAID0 or not. I will definitely go with the Pegasus2 R4 and then experiment with it!

Happy Holidays!

 

[VirtualRain]

Thank you VirtualRain, dkmooers and everyone else. Yes I have a lot of sample libraries (currently about 2.5gb of data) so I need that space.

I'm still unsure whether if I should RAID0 or not. I will definitely go with the Pegasus2 R4 and then experiment with it!

Happy Holidays!

I think that's best, but keep in mind that the R4 will ONLY work in RAID, it does not support JBOD (Just A Bunch of Disks) which would allow you to experiment.

If this concerns you (and it shouldn't since I'm certain RAID0 will be the best way to go), then you should wait until you have your nMP in hand and then buy the R4 from a vendor that offers a reasonable return policy just in case it doesn't work the way you like in RAID0.

 

[aLfR3dd]

I think that's best, but keep in mind that the R4 will ONLY work in RAID, it does not support JBOD (Just A Bunch of Disks) which would allow you to experiment.

If this concerns you (and it shouldn't since I'm certain RAID0 will be the best way to go), then you should wait until you have your nMP in hand and then buy the R4 from a vendor that offers a reasonable return policy just in case it doesn't work the way you like in RAID0.

Thanks for letting me know about that.. I think I will just go with RAID0 then

 

[dkmooers]

Do post an update here when you get your nMP! Excited to hear how it works out.

What specs did you go for, by the way? Trying to decide on 6 vs 8 vs 12 core, internal storage, etc., for doing composition / orchestral stuff.

 

[aLfR3dd]

Do post an update here when you get your nMP! Excited to hear how it works out.

What specs did you go for, by the way? Trying to decide on 6 vs 8 vs 12 core, internal storage, etc., for doing composition / orchestral stuff.

I'll see if I remember but yeah 4 SSDs Pegasus2 R4 enclosure RAID0 is what I'll do.

I got 8 cores.. Cubase, Logic etc. all take advantage of multi cores so I don't see why I shouldn't get more cores if I can.

 

[mythos]

1. Pegasus2 R4 Diskless - You must run them in RAID... it doesn't support JBOD.

Are you sure about this ? The Apple store page seems to suggest otherwise:

"The Pegasus2 R4 Diskless System allows existing Mac Pro users upgrading to the newest Mac Pro model to migrate current storage seamlessly. Simply remove your drives from your current Mac Pro and reinstall into the drive trays of the Pegasus2 R4 Diskless system to get instant access to all of your data."

 

[dkmooers]

Does this help?

http://store.apple.com/us/question/...osure-will-function-in-jbod/QTCX7YJF44XYCYD9D