Upgrading your M+ SD card

I've been using a 256gb card with my Maschine since day one, but decided to buy a 512gb card as it was getting pretty full.

Question then is which is the best way to copy the card, or is it better to do this in the M+?

At first I tried copying the card on the laptop, but forgot to test it before adding more expansions and a project or 2 to the original card. When I then tried to Merge the folder by adding the new content, it looked like it was going over and above what was on the original card, so I stopped the copying. It's like a 3 hour process to copy around 200,000 files files from scratch too, but now I have extra stuff to copy.

I then erased and reformatted the card, put it in the Maschine and started downloading expansions in Settings > Library, but after checking what can be installed, I can't see the instruments, fx and the Maschine content. So either they're already installed in memory inside the M+, or they need to be uninstalled from somewhere to be reinstalled?

PS, I accidentally posted this in Social first by mistake if a mod can please clean it up while I have no powers to delete my posts.

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D-One

Some stuff is installed internally, plugins and whatnot.

What matters in your case is all in the main Native Instruments folder, so just copy that over and you should be fine. If you have a slow SD Card and/or USB2 card reader than it's normal for it to take forever.

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D-One

Some stuff is installed internally, plugins and whatnot.

Jiglo

Good to know that Raum, the instruments and Maschine content is installed already, thanks. I should have retried copying from card to card again. Would have been much faster and would probably have got a session in this evening. Will have to at some point copy card to card to copy across my user files and i'm not sure what will happen if I try to turn it off early to do that while there are Expansions waiting to download, so thankfully I only clicked to install less than half the Expansions before asking this question or I would no doubt have to leave it downloading overnight.

I'm using a Samsung Evo Plus. It's 130mb/s read, so not the fastest, but no mention of write speed. It was slotted into the M1 Pro's sd card reader, but might be the dock that's slower than the mac's port, or just the quantity of smaller files.

Would be interested to know if spending twice as much on a faster card would yield any performance gains? Maybe faster saves, boot up times and powering off and if they're significant?

D-One

@Jiglo

Try to find out the exact model, write speed can be roughly the same as the read one or really low (25/mbs). Copying many small files is always much slower than copying a small amount of huge files, i don't think any drives reaches it's max speed in this type of file transfer.

Would be interested to know if spending twice as much on a faster card would yield any performance gains? Maybe faster saves, boot up times and powering off and if they're significant?

At 90 mb/s you're already at the limit of UHS-1 and USB2 (We actually don't know if the card reader of the M+ is USB2 or 3, NI refuses to answer it), some can be a bit faster with some trickery but not much. It does not improve boot, but it improves scanning content, large sample destructive edits and similar, theres a big difference between say the original card that cames with the M+ and a 90-120mb/s read/write quality card.

So, super fast cards (100 mb/s+) will only be an advantage when connected to a computer, for transfers or backups, in your case the M1 Pro can go up to 250MB/s since it's UHS-2. Really fast SD cards are more expensive than NVME's, so they're def not worth it IMO.

Jiglo

Appreciate your knowledge and time D-One, thanks.

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