External SSD Slow with Kontakt. Need help

Hi, so I recently bought a Samsung 850 evo SSD with a OWC Express usb 3.0 enclosure.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ES2.5BU3W/

I reformatted the drive to exFAT and am getting reads of about 400 MB/s which seems good. It's connected through usb 3.0 and when I load libraries it usually does fine, but when I load up big orchestral libraries the sounds are not consistent and have a hard time playing. Also loading some libraries take forever. I tested it out the libraries on my internal SSD and it's works much better. I know that external will not be as fast as an internal ssd but I feel like I missed something here. I was hoping to have a dedicated ssd that will handle my libraries smoothly. I am thinking maybe I picked the wrong enclosure?

Here are my specs for my computer

Mac 10.10.2
2.5 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

 

Check System Information (Apple Menu > About This Mac > More Info) and verify that that enclosure really is running at USB3 speeds, and not USB2. You didn't mention which model Mac you have; some Macs don't have USB3.

I don't have firsthand experience using USB3 for sample streaming. USB2 definitely wasn't sufficient for significant quantities of sample streaming.

 

I have a mid 2014 macbook. It says USB 3.0 so I think thats all okay. The enclosure was a cheap $20 one. Is it possible there are better enclosures out there? Or is there a way I'm suppose to format my drive?

 

Does System Information confirm that that specific drive is running at USB3 speeds? It should tell you. (If it says 480Mbit, that's USB2 speeds.)

Formatting shouldn't make a difference, as far as I know.

 

I'm not sure if I'm looking in the right place but I looked at Hardware > USB > USB 3.0 SuperSpeed Bus and I see on my hard drive "speed: Up to 5 Gb/sec." There must be something wrong that I'm not doing.

 

Yes, you're looking in the right place, and if that speed designation is referring to your USB3 hard drive (not another hard drive) then yes, it's running at USB3 speeds.

I'm really not sure what to suggest here. There's a possibility exFAT is slowing it down (because it's not the Mac's preference) but I'm not sure of that -- you could go to all the trouble of reformatting it into Mac format and recopying all the data over, and find that it's still slow.

I guess the next thing I would do is launch Kontakt and load lots of instruments from the USB3 drive, and keep an eye on the Engine tab (which gives you detailed statistics about how Kontakt is doing) and see if you can pinpoint where the slowdown is.

Also, you could try altering the instrument preload buffer size (it's a global setting in the Options) and see if that helps any.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what else to suggest.

 

I wouldn't use exfat for any mac drive unless that drive is specifically intended for use on a PC too. Try reformatting to the standard mac format.

Beyond that, some Kontakt libraries just load way faster than others, even on SSD. I definitely feel like Kontakt hasn't really been optimized for SSD yet, hopefully they'll work on that in the next version.

 

I don't use MAC. But fwiw i can give this inputin addition to the other input's in this thread.

1. Check your USB cable is good enough. Very important it's not a bad one. Sometimes the ones that come with the product is broken/ bad. I have that experience.

2. Check the USB 3.0 port speed. A lot of technical things can mean, that you maybe only get around 2/3 of the speed. Even less if it's a bad connection. Not all USB 3.0 connection offer top speed. I don't know how you can check, but search the web.

3. I the computer shut down the USB port's to save power, then make sure it do'nt do that.

4. I use a "Samsung Magician" app for optimizing a internal SSD on a e-sata 3 port. I think you can download one for your drive too, on Samsungs website.

5. Be sure the USB 3.0 connection is only used by the SSD, if you wan't the port's full speed at all time for that task.

I can say, that from a external USB 3.0 connected 7200 HD to using a internal SSD on e-sata 6 Gb/s has made a world in difference for me using Kontakt.
However i do not on the external HD experience the drop out's you talk about with standard kontakt buffer size. Only if i stress the load. So i guess you run slow for some reason or stress the drive.

For the time beeing i would use internal SSD's. Or maybe some fast Thunderbolt connections if possible.
EDIT: Maybe could use USB 3.1 too.

If using USB 3.0 you have to ensure that all in the signal chain from the disk, over the cable, to the pc's external connection to the internal connections and the motherboard and chipset is optimized to allow full technical possible USB 3.0 speed at 5Gb/s, and that this speed is not shared by anything else, and ensure the connection don't shut down to save power and so on.
As far as i know, then a speed faster than USB 2.0 can be called USB 3.0, but it don't have to mean you get the 5 GB/s. You can get up that speed on a optimal USB 3.0 connection.
And as i said - Even with the full speed you can only expect around 2/3 of that speed in practice.

Also check your OWC Express usb 3.0 enclosure. Maybe you can check the drive without this somehow. I would if possible.

The (sequentiel) read speed about 400 MB/s you inform about, is less than 80 % of your drives capacity. Maybe that too has an impact.

Maybe you should speak with a pc builder about it. I would suggest so. I'm not a technician. But you can check my suggestions.

Hope this will help.

Good luck.

 

Hello, I have the exact same SSD model and had problems with two enclosures until I found one that has worked. And yes, the two first ones were cheap (product codes LC-25WU3 and SST-RVS02). The former worked for a while but started to have slowness / hanging problems after a while and then I started to get some read errors and even force eject did not work. The latter did not even manage to recognize the SSD.

The one that works is: dLite1, Delightfully Fast and Compact USB 3.0 Enclosure, and I found it here: http://firmtek.stores.yahoo.net/dlite1.html

SSD is formatted to HFS+