What are the minimum requirements for an SSD External Hard drive for VST's?

ArtBerkeley

I'm looking at investing in an external ssd hard drive for storing all my VST's on and was hoping you guys could share what the required minimum specs are? (e.g., MB/s, USB 3.0, etc.)

Thanks in advance!

reffahcs

You need to at least tell people what type of computer you have and it's current configuration. How many internal SATA ports do you have? Does your motherboard have built in NVMe slots. Are you only able to connect a drive externally via USB, is it 2.0 or 3.0? Does your computer have Thunderbolt ports, are they 3.0 or 4.0? Are you using a PC or a MAC. What type of budget are you looking at? Some basic info would go a long ways in helping provide a useful response to your question.

As a general rule, these days I would suggest a nothing less than an NVMe drive, preferably internal but if using an external enclosure, use the fastest possible connection.

ArtBerkeley

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/134152#Comment_134152

Sorry about that 😅

I'll have to follow up with my exact system specs tomorrow, but off the top, I have a PC on Windows 10 and have USB 3.0 and a 3.1 connections. I'll have to follow up about the motherboard slots and ports soon. I'm hoping to spend between $100-$150 for a drive.

I heard about external SSD's and thought they were a desirable option, but you're recommending internal drives as the better choice?

reffahcs

Oh I didn't mean to imply exact system specs, just a general idea of what you're working with. There's a huge difference between a Mac Mini and a full tower PC is all. And even PC motherboards, some have no NVMe slots, and others have multiple.

If your motherboard has NVMe slots, then I would use those first. You'll get the fastest speeds using those.

If you have SATA III (3) or USB 3.0 then it's a bit of a wash as either one will get you about 600 MB/s. If it were me, I would still opt with the internal SATA III connection because anytime you introduce an external device, that's just more room for latency and performance loss.

ArtBerkeley

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/134155#Comment_134155

Do you think the 600 MB/s SATA iii has noticeable latency compared to the faster NVMe?

Unfortunately, I don't think my motherboard has NVMe slots, so I'm looking at the Samsung 870 EVO SATA iii 1TB SSD as an option.

reffahcs

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/134159#Comment_134159

I think for music plugins and NI libraries that SATA III is more than adequate. If you're going SATA III you might want to future proof a bit (since SATA III is cheaper than NVMe) and go with a larger drive so you can add to your instrument collection.

If you're on a budget then 1TB is a good choice, but take a look at what you have now in terms of libraries and plugins and think about how much you may want to grab in the future.

Cheers

ArtBerkeley

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/134160#Comment_134160

Sounds good. Thanks for your help on this!

MyStudioOne

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/134155#Comment_134155

100% agree. INTERNAL drive always preferable of course. NVME m.2 best choice. Then SSD. A higher end MVME is reading at 7000 mb/s. SSD is only 5-600 mb/s. That is a night and day difference for performance. If you use software like East/West's Opus plugin, NVME is so fast that Opus can run straight off the NVME drive without loading to RAM.

Kubrak

Yes, NVMe SSD is about one order (10x) faster than SATA6 SSD. And it is for sure well noticeable difference in case of large sample libraries.

Internal is probably preferable…. Unless the speed is of higher importance and computer has fast USB. In that case one might consider NVMe SSD in USB enclosure. But fast USB is needed. Or Thunderbolt port and NVMe SSD in Thunderbolt enclosure.

Sidenote. The speeds MyStudioOne has presented should have MByte/s not Mbit/s label….

Ojustaboo

On my 13 year old win 10 pro desktop with 64GB RAM and i7 LGA2011 CPU

Crucial x8 2TB external SSD

plugged into one of my USB 3.0 motherboard slots. Everything worked fine except for some of the bigger loops included with my Studio One DAW, which made browsing loops in Studio One unusable.

I tried everything to fix that problem.

I gave up on that SSD, and as my motherboard (ASUS P9X79) is too old to have a NVMe slot I bought

GLOTRENDS PA09-HS M.2 NVMe to PCIe 4.0 X4 Adapter with M.2 Heatsink for 2280/2260/2242/2230 M.2 NVMe SSD

And bought

Crucial P3 Plus SSD 4TB M.2 NVMe PCIe Gen4 internal SSD, Up to 4800 MB/s

to plug into it.

I reformatted my PC, reinstalled Win 10 pro and installed all my music software to their default locations (hence everything ended up on the new NVMe drive)

My previous C drive (internal SSD) had a read speed of around 500MB/s

Checking the read and write speeds of this new NVMe C drive, this new one was around 3000MB/s

Made zero difference, no noticeable speed improvements starting music software, the big loops in Studio One Plus still making browsing loops unusable (had to remove the biggest loops to fix this).

Something else is causing my problems, still, getting a new PC at some point in the next few months.

But, I just got a 2021 MacBook Pro with M1 Pro chip and 16GB RAM.

I’ve used the same Crucial x8 2TB external SSD that I first used on my desktop, I used a thunderbolt cable rather than a normal USB-C cable to connect it, and installed all my music software to this drive.

Running a test, I’m getting 700 - 900MB/s read.

Everything opens much much quicker than on my desktop PC and I also have the large loop files installed and browsing loops in Studio One is perfect.

The point of me telling you this is that me spending a reasonable amount of money trying to speed up my Desktop music software loading times achieved nothing, turns out the disk read/write speed isn’t causing my bottleneck.

Kubrak

Well, yes CPU or RAM size/speed may also play role, disc speed is just one of possible botlenecks.