is the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD 1TB enough to store and run the Komplete 14 ultimate Library

NickVegas · 2024-02-21T23:10:40+00:00

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hello I am new to the entire NI eco system, so apologies if this has been asked/answered before.

I am starting my journey into the digital side of music making (this will be my first MIDI keyboard and Library). I am going to be using the S series S88 mk3 keybaord and will download Komplete Standard, possibly upgrading to Ultimate.

my computer and external SSD specs are: 2020 M1 Macbook pro this has two thunderbolt/USB 4 ports that support thunderbolt 3/USB 4. memory 8GB storage 256GB SSD. for my external SSD i got a 1TB SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD with a read speed of 1050MB/s and Write speed of 1000 MB/s.

My question is, in order to save space on my computer, I was planning on downloading the Komplete Library on my external SSD. Will that be able to even worth with my SanDisk? if it does do I have to worry about and latency or slower browsing speeds? if this is problematic, is there a better way to store/access this massive library?

thanks!

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BIF

1 TB is big enough for some of the NI products, yes. But not all of the products from the NI partners.

Here are some statistics from my system:

Native Instruments: I have Ultimate Collectors or something, so it's 1.8 TB

Here are the absolute largest products in my Native Instruments' library. I've rounded up or down to the nearest gigabyte. 1000 gig is 1TB.

Cineperc - 93 GB
Lores - 67 GB
Choir - Omnia - 66
Fables - 53
Scarbee - 50
Kontakt Factory 2 - 37 GB
Cinestrings 45
Session Strings Pro - 34
Symphony Series (String, Woodwind, Percussion, and Brass) About 120 GB

Just from what I've listed here, you'd be at a half-terabyte. Add in the 20 Komplete instruments that are between 20 and 30 GB, and you're up to 1 TB, or pretty close to it.

If you're going to get Komplete only and not any of the extra titles, or buy any partner libraries, your 1TB drive will be fine.

But if you like libraries like I do, you'll eventually need one or more bigger drives. You won't need it immediately, but you will want to plan for it. As an example, my 4 drive partitions reserved for VST libraries, most of them being Kontakt instruments, totals about 4.5 TB.

Sample-based libraries can be big. 90 GB for one library isn't big at all, but if you have ten libraries of that size, you're close to a TB without even thinking about it.

NickVegas

Wow, fantastic. thanks for your answer!

I think I am starting to understand some of these concepts now. I get that different products/instruments have different storage demand based on their size. just as an example, I looked up the ultimate library and it said it was 770GB. so does that mean that this is accounting for the summation of all the products like instruments, FX, included expansions ...ect? this would all be "stock" and if I wanted to expand sounds in the NI world it would just keep creeping closer to 1TB? if theoretically I just wanted to stay in ultimate and explore sounds and instruments for a while, do you think my specs could run them without any weird latency problems (as opposed to just downloading everything straight to the Macbook?)

as far as finding new libraries and sounds, would it be too convoluted to just save those to my computer directly or even another storage place? or is it technically better to have a full comprehensive library of all sounds and companies in the same place?

Monochrome

Just to give you some perspective: Komplete 14 Ultimate has a size of 770 GB for its complete (!) installation listed as per the System Requirements page. Komplete 15 Ultimate - due in fall/autumn of this year - will (obviously) be larger than that as more (previously released) content gets added.

You may not need/want to have everything that comes with it installed, though, but like BIF said: library sizes can be pretty huge. There are lots of third-party companies out there offering great libraries for Kontakt - e.g. Impact Soundworks' Tokyo Scoring Strings, coming in at 84GB.

If you can afford it, go with a e.g. 5 TB drive.

PoorFellow

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/26887/is-the-sandisk-extreme-portable-ssd-1tb-enough-to-store-and-run-the-komplete-14-ultimate-library

K14 Ultimate is over 1060 GB and the K14 Collectors Edition over 1.5 TB , with some of it being apps and what not being put on system drive it is possible that you could squeeze the Content Library part of the K14U onto your SanDisk drive and else you could leave out a few of the biggest libraries that you can do without. Also your drive sounds OK speed wise and it appears to also have NVME internal, but in my experience external drives in between can give hiccups that you would not have seen with an internal drive , but maybe that is not the same on Mac , I dunno.

Anyway , if the 1TB is what you got and the K14U can more or less fit then why make problems out of that ? You can always buy a larger drive later and copy all the stuff from one drive to another should you decide to upgrade your bundle or just the drive !

Please notice the disk format requirement ! :

Notes on Network Drives and Disk Formats : https://support.native-instruments.com/hc/en-us/articles/360014663958-Notes-on-Network-Drives-and-Disk-Formats

How to Enable Full Disk Access on macOS : https://support.native-instruments.com/hc/en-us/articles/4415601248657-How-to-Enable-Full-Disk-Access-on-macOS

All comments

BIF

1 TB is big enough for some of the NI products, yes. But not all of the products from the NI partners.

Here are some statistics from my system:

Native Instruments: I have Ultimate Collectors or something, so it's 1.8 TB

Here are the absolute largest products in my Native Instruments' library. I've rounded up or down to the nearest gigabyte. 1000 gig is 1TB.

Cineperc - 93 GB
Lores - 67 GB
Choir - Omnia - 66
Fables - 53
Scarbee - 50
Kontakt Factory 2 - 37 GB
Cinestrings 45
Session Strings Pro - 34
Symphony Series (String, Woodwind, Percussion, and Brass) About 120 GB

Just from what I've listed here, you'd be at a half-terabyte. Add in the 20 Komplete instruments that are between 20 and 30 GB, and you're up to 1 TB, or pretty close to it.

If you're going to get Komplete only and not any of the extra titles, or buy any partner libraries, your 1TB drive will be fine.

Sample-based libraries can be big. 90 GB for one library isn't big at all, but if you have ten libraries of that size, you're close to a TB without even thinking about it.

NickVegas

Wow, fantastic. thanks for your answer!

Monochrome

If you can afford it, go with a e.g. 5 TB drive.

PoorFellow

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/26887/is-the-sandisk-extreme-portable-ssd-1tb-enough-to-store-and-run-the-komplete-14-ultimate-library

Please notice the disk format requirement ! :

Notes on Network Drives and Disk Formats : https://support.native-instruments.com/hc/en-us/articles/360014663958-Notes-on-Network-Drives-and-Disk-Formats

How to Enable Full Disk Access on macOS : https://support.native-instruments.com/hc/en-us/articles/4415601248657-How-to-Enable-Full-Disk-Access-on-macOS

NickVegas

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/134904#Comment_134904

due to the hiccups external drives can cause, is it better to do a "download as you use them" method straight to my computer? I just worry about that way because I only have about 250GBish to play around with space available on the macbook itself.

I am gathering from the answers that if I wanted to stay just within Ultimate I will be most likely fine. I I do want to expand like you were saying in the future and transfer things over, do you have a specific drive(s) that you recommend?

NickVegas

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/134902#Comment_134902

Thank you for the advice! any 5TB drives specifically or would any be good?

BIF

You'll use Native Access to do the download+installations, and Native Access does show you what the size will be for the library you've selected. Just compare that to the freespace on the drive. Do bear in mind that the numbers can differ from one place to another. Once you get to less than 40-50 GB of freespace, you're going to need to source a bigger drive. You can still buy a product with 2-5 GB in size, but you probably don't want to be putting any 25-30 GB libraries on a drive that's nearly full.

If Native Access (or more likely, the internal installer for any individual library) fails because it can't find enough free space, it'll show you a red message in NA and you'll have to figure out what you want to do from there.

Longer term, if you're going to get Ultimate and maybe add some Heavyocity libraries, some SonicCouture libraries, and some additional orchestral libraries from here, there, or everywhere, then you're going to be frustrated with "only" a 1TB drive.

------------------

And finally, my sermon on backup drives, because this soup line ain't free. 😉

YOU. NEED. BACKUP. DRIVES. AND. BACKUP. SOFTWARE

And the drives need to be big enough to store multiple copies of your computer's files. Each of my computers has 2 or more dedicated backup drives (I alternate), and those drives are between 2X and 8X the size of the drives on that computer. For example, an 8 TB laptop would have a completely separate backup drive no less than 16 TB.

Yes, even for your Native Instrument library partitions. Yes, even though your libraries don't get updated nearly as often as your documents. It's a heck of a lot faster and less stressful to just restore a partition than it is to re-install all the stuff that was on that drive.

Because the NI libraries don't change often on my systems, I have my backups set up to take full backups once only every other month, and incrementals every 2 weeks. Compare that to my system drive and my documents drive. These get a full backup each week, with incrementals every 8 hours.

I use Macrium Reflect for backups, and it has saved me from my own foolishness more often than I'd like to admit.

Good luck!

PoorFellow

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/134908#Comment_134908

The hiccups thing is mostly just me worrying. On PC it happens from time to time there are USB issues or if you allow drive to go to sleep and so on. No need to make big issue out of what has not been a problem yet. Anyway , you already got the drive so you ought to at least test it.

Yes, no matter what then download the stuff in chunks that are manageable and that will not fill the temp space of your drive , then make sure that you got enough temp space before next stage of downloads , no need to make mishaps or cause extreme waits just because you couldn't resist the Download All button ! First install ALL apps then install expansions in chunks and select those you want to try the most first !

Other than that , NO , there should be no need to just download some of it , unless that you do not care for the rest.

There is however one issue . SSD drives including NVME SSDs are not supposed to be filled more than %80 (at least that used to be the recommended number) because it could otherwise lead to performance degradation due to some internal drive space management feature on SSDs. It may however not be so great an issue in real life unless you really fill the drive , just watch out for problems if you decide to fill the drive very much. I once filled a SSD almost to the brink and it can be done , but theoretically it should be avoided !

As for recommendations then they are to use quality housing and quality drives that are fast USB 3.1 / USB4 / Thunderbolt 4 casing interface and fast NVME internal interface and drive. I do not have any real personal experiences with that though I own and have used an external NVME casing that were fast to me. Anyway , what I can buy where I am you could maybe not buy at your location. Also there are many here that can recommend stuff I have participated in discussions myself and I will paste links to some discussions below here .

Best wishes !

(Two page discussion) New Computer Migration + SSD? : https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/18395/new-computer-migration-ssd/p1

External SSD recommendation : https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/13787/external-ssd-recommendation

What are the minimum requirements for an SSD External Hard drive for VST's? : https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/26773/what-are-the-minimum-requirements-for-an-ssd-external-hard-drive-for-vsts

New SSD for better & consistent load times : https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/14522/new-ssd-for-better-consistent-load-times

NickVegas

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/134914#Comment_134914

you are awesome thanks for the advice! those are all great points and I think I have some storage needs to consider haha!

PoorFellow

P.S.

Please notice if ever buying external casing for storage that external casings in some cases have limitations to how large drives they are able to support. Then NVME one I have e.g. only supports NVME up to 2TB ! So when you buy external drive casing then always check specifications ! For standard SATA drive casings then drive space size limitations below drive sizes normally sold is rarer but still worth to check !

NickVegas

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/134916#Comment_134916

amazing! thanks for all the advice. All of this is completely new to me so there will have to be some experimenting. Although if I could start off with the least amount of problems possible, that would be great haha! appreciate it!

Kubrak

Just small note, if someone else has not wrote yet. I have not read all comments...

You may install part of Komplete/Expansion Content to internal disk and part to external. Generally, one may install NI Content to multiple discs. One just needs to change target folder for each partial installation.

So, if things do not fit all to external, you may start to fill up internal disc.

NickVegas

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/134931#Comment_134931

This is exactly what I was thinking as a backup option! I didn’t know if I could split up downloaded items to different places! Thank you!

LostInFoundation

In my experience hiccups with external disks largely depends on the USB ports you have at your disposal on your computer, not so much from the disk you chose. Good ports lead to an experience closer to the one with internal disks.

Same is valid for disks speed and performances. I’m almost sure many people buy disks with the best latest performances to then just plug them to old usb ports and have them working at half their capacity (or worst)…

It’s the same as with TVs…everyone thinks they need the latest 4k latest led technology screens…to then just watch public television channels that still send in Full HD…

Kubrak

This is exactly what I was thinking as a backup option! I didn’t know if I could split up downloaded items to different places! Thank you!

You may do it even later, copy choosen Libraries from current place to desired place and use relocate in NA. Just, it is not possible to do relocate as bulk, but one has to do it library by library.

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