Copying all my libraries to a brand new 4TB SSD drive is it supposed to be this slow?

[wing]

I recently picked up an external SanDisk/G-Drive 4TB SSD drive to house all my sample libraries. My current thunderbolt2 drive is showing its age (I think I've had it for about 8 years), occasionally making some funny sounds in spite of the fact this software I have named DriveDX says its health status is "OK" with no issues, with approximately 56% life remaining.

Regardless, I feel like SSD is a good move for sample libraries to load more quickly. So imagine my surprise when it's come to copying everything... I got the drive on Tuesday and here on Saturday I'm still undergoing the process. I have about 2.5TB to transfer and started doing it in smaller chunks by library brand (Spitfire, OT, VSL).

This is the message I originally got with Spitfire which is my largest -



Yikes! Fortunately it was overcalculated but it still did take about 3 full days. Trying to give my computer and the drives some rest time in between.

But nonetheless, this seems pretty crazy. I've heard that some SSD drives have a throttle, specifically for writing. (WHY?) Is this something I should be concerned about? Will this kind of thing effect my performance? I guess I will just be using it to read samples mostly, but it does have me a bit concerned especially since drives usually can't be returned AFAIK...

Click to read more...

 

[Technostica]

That does seem slow.
I recently copied over 4TB of sample libraries from an internal SSD to an external USB 3.0 HDD and it averaged about 160MBs.
So it took only about 7 hours.

 

[wing]

That does seem slow.
I recently copied over 4TB of sample libraries from an internal SSD to an external USB 3.0 HDD and it averaged about 160MBs.
So it took only about 7 hours.

I wonder if it could be due to the fact I'm going the opposite way – copying from an internal HDD to an external SSD. Apparently I've been reading that writing is throttled as a protective measure to prevent overheating.

That article mentions it's most likely for writing. Hopefully reading won't be an issue (I'll save my actual project files to another drive while working). But nonetheless, had I known this, I maybe would've looked further into a fan-based external.

 

[Technostica]

What is the source drive?
If it's a HDD that could be the issue and especially with libraries consisting of loads of small files.

 

[Arkain]

ports are also important, try to plug it to usb-c if you have one in your pc

 

[wing]

What is the source drive?
If it's a HDD that could be the issue and especially with libraries consisting of loads of small files.

Thunderbolt-2 G-Tech G-Drive HDD (7200rpm I believe). Could be. I just remember when copying from say one thunderbolt (or usb3) HDD to another, it's been significantly faster than this.

 

[Technostica]

The bottleneck will be reading from the HDD.
It's highly unlikely that the SSD will throttle that badly unless you use it in a sauna.
Just make sure that you aren't using a USB 2.0 port or a cable that isn't certified for 5Gbs.

There's a simple way to test performance which is to copy a single large file.
If it doesn’t go above 40MBs, you are stuck in USB 2.0 mode.

 

[wing]

I am using a USB 3.0 port (confirmed looking at MacOS system profiler that it's on the USB 3.0 bus), with the provided USB-C to USB-A cable. The documentation does not say though I would be shocked if it it's USB-C to USB 2.0, especially with a new drive in 2023?! (I also believe that if using a USB 2.0 cable or flash drive, System Profiler will list it under USB 2.0 accordingly).
Though I guess I could try another cable just in case...

 

[Olnium]

It'll probably be quicker to use something like Macrium reflect (or the MacOS equivalent) to just clone the source drive, then load that image onto the new destination. I can image a 1Tb drive in about 20 mins, and restore it in the same amount of time, so you could be done in a few hours.

 

[Technostica]

I am using a USB 3.0 port (confirmed looking at MacOS system profiler that it's on the USB 3.0 bus), with the provided USB-C to USB-A cable. The documentation does not say though I would be shocked if it it's USB-C to USB 2.0, especially with a new drive in 2023?! (I also believe that if using a USB 2.0 cable or flash drive, System Profiler will list it under USB 2.0 accordingly).
Though I guess I could try another cable just in case...

I would do the quick test that I outlined above as it only takes a minute or less.

 

[wing]

I would do the quick test that I outlined above as it only takes a minute or less.

Tried another cable and tried the single file test, didn't see much of a difference. System says it's over USB3, claiming the connected drive can perform "up to 5 GB/s" which I'm sure is theoretical anyway.
I just ran a couple speed tests on the two drives:

Thunderbolt 2 7200rpm HDD -


New USB 3.0 SSD -


So yeah, obviously not the fastest read from the original source drive. But nonetheless I was expecting way better performance overall.

Though just now I read this article about my trusty old computer... The key point it mentions is "even a single SSD will not run beyond about 430 MB/sec." So I suppose this is in the realm of what I can expect until I eventually upgrade computers... sigh. Well at least it's 3x faster than the older thunderbolt drive, which I was able to miraculously run somewhat big sessions from *shrugs*

 

[wing]

Oh, well, this is interesting – I decided to take a chance by starting over from scratch reformatting the drive from HFS+ to APFS. That seemed to have fixed it– It has suddenly sky-rocketed - just copied a 50GB folder in 10 minutes. That same folder took several hours the other day.

 

[jbuhler]

Oh, well, this is interesting – I decided to take a chance by starting over from scratch reformatting the drive from HFS+ to APFS. That seemed to have fixed it– It has suddenly sky-rocketed - just copied a 50GB folder in 10 minutes. That same folder took several hours the other day.

I don't know if this is still a thing, but it used to be the APFS didn't work that well for streaming samples, especially for Kontakt. I'm interested to hear if that has changed.

 

[wing]

I don't know if this is still a thing, but it used to be the APFS didn't work that well for streaming samples, especially for Kontakt. I'm interested to hear if that has changed.

I actually just spent almost an hour reading up on this before I did it. Sounds like most users were reporting 8dio and a few other quite old ones, none of which I own. A chance I'm willing to take – but yes, fingers crossed.

 

[jbuhler]

I actually just spent almost an hour reading up on this before I did it. Sounds like most users were reporting 8dio and a few other quite old ones, none of which I own. A chance I'm willing to take – but yes, fingers crossed.

Please do report after you've had a chance to test it a bit. I haven't heard anyone give the all clear and so have habitually using HFS+ to format external SSDs. I'm also on an intel mac. I don't know if that makes a difference.

 

[HCMarkus]

My drives, HD and SATA/NVMe SSD, are formatted APFS. Working great for all functions, including sample streaming..

Mac Studio running macOS 12.6.2.

 

[wing]

Please do report after you've had a chance to test it a bit. I haven't heard anyone give the all clear and so have habitually using HFS+ to format external SSDs. I'm also on an intel mac. I don't know if that makes a difference.

Will do. From my perspective after doing a lot of reading, it seems NI and Apple both have been recommending APFS for several years now, since MacOS 10.13 (2017). I also have the new update to Kontakt released late last year, though it's not clear if they've been able to address this issue (it sounds more related to library developers than Kontakt itself?). But with a new drive, I feel like it's ideal to be a little more future proof, at least for the next decade.

I'm currently on an intel mac too but planning on upgrading within the next year - eyeing specifically if Apple might re-release a new iMac Pro. We'll see. I'm rebuilding a new template and going through all my kontakt libraries so I think I'll have a chance to see if there's anything funny with them, and will report back. I'm not a fan of 8dio (I only have a couple of their libraries) so if they won't load for me, I'll cut my losses as I rarely use them. But we'll see if any other libraries are affected. Fingers crossed!

 

[micrologus]

My 4Tb SSD are formatted APFS, no problem here.