Komplete 15 Collectors Edition - much larger than quoted 1.1TB?

BassAddict
BassAddict Member Posts: 12 Member

Hey all,

I'm a longtime user of a few select NI products who's just made the jump to Komplete 15 CE with the current sale. First ever post here too, whoo!

I use Logic on a MBP with a 1TB SSD. I'm planning to use a high-spec external drive (will create another post about this) that I am yet to purchase.

For now though I have a spare 1TB external drive and have changed my content location in NI Access to this drive, then clicked 'install all' to it to download what I thought was the bulk of K15ce (which I can clone to the new disc when obtained) until it ran out of space. NI's specs says it's 1100gb to install EVERYTHING so I was expecting a 100GB-ish shortfall, which I could most likely live with longterm anyway as I will never really need everything all at once, just nice to have, right?

However, my 1TB SSD has maxed out with approx 342GB of intruments left to install, according to NI Access and I've not even started on expansions or Kontact libraries yet.

Am I missing something? Can any K15ce users who have EVERYTHING installed confirm the size of their content folder please?

I will be moving other content to this drive that would fit with the quoted 1100GB K15ce content. I was planning on getting a high-spec 2TB external drive but now I'm concerned it wont fit and a 4TB drive is quite a price jump.

Cheers 😊

Best Answer

  • PoorFellow
    PoorFellow Moderator Posts: 4,866 mod
    edited December 5 Answer βœ“

    I didn't understand the 1100 GB myself either and would have thought that that were the compressed download size maybe, but I am really not sure. Also then I have absolutely no idea how much space that the apps and plugins takes off of the system drive. The only thing that I know for sure is that the collected size of the 'Content' (libraries and expansions) from Komplete 14 CE and Komplete 15 CE on my drive is around 1,4 TB , I also do not know the size of what were taken away if any between K14 CE and K15 CE.

    But my main point is that the 'Content' part when installed is 1,4 TB or less.

    As for hard drive size then yes it takes a lot and it gets worse if you add a lot of third party libraries. If you want to install Komplete 15 CE then I'd say that you need to go with at least a 2 TB drive and you also ought to be advised that at least earlier in time it were advised to not fill SSD drives more than %80 due to that it could give a penalty performance wise. I have previously filled a smaller SSD drive much more than that myself and thought it to be OK but still I thought that I'd mention it.

    If you have a lot of other stuff including third party libraries and audio software suites of other makes then you could soon end up in a situation where not even 4 TB is enough. It's not enough for me so I have personally had to spread content from more makes over two drives. Luckily then prices of SSD drives has dropped considerably so now one can get even a good 4 TB NVME SSD for the price that earlier in time one could only get a SATA SSD of measly 500 GB or less. But of course then computer hard drives are still not exactly given away.

    List of installed K14CE + K15CE library content with a library size of more than 12 GB:

    Installed K14CE + K15CE library content with a library size of more than 4,5 GB and less than 12 GB :

Answers

  • PoorFellow
    PoorFellow Moderator Posts: 4,866 mod
    edited December 5 Answer βœ“

    I didn't understand the 1100 GB myself either and would have thought that that were the compressed download size maybe, but I am really not sure. Also then I have absolutely no idea how much space that the apps and plugins takes off of the system drive. The only thing that I know for sure is that the collected size of the 'Content' (libraries and expansions) from Komplete 14 CE and Komplete 15 CE on my drive is around 1,4 TB , I also do not know the size of what were taken away if any between K14 CE and K15 CE.

    But my main point is that the 'Content' part when installed is 1,4 TB or less.

    As for hard drive size then yes it takes a lot and it gets worse if you add a lot of third party libraries. If you want to install Komplete 15 CE then I'd say that you need to go with at least a 2 TB drive and you also ought to be advised that at least earlier in time it were advised to not fill SSD drives more than %80 due to that it could give a penalty performance wise. I have previously filled a smaller SSD drive much more than that myself and thought it to be OK but still I thought that I'd mention it.

    If you have a lot of other stuff including third party libraries and audio software suites of other makes then you could soon end up in a situation where not even 4 TB is enough. It's not enough for me so I have personally had to spread content from more makes over two drives. Luckily then prices of SSD drives has dropped considerably so now one can get even a good 4 TB NVME SSD for the price that earlier in time one could only get a SATA SSD of measly 500 GB or less. But of course then computer hard drives are still not exactly given away.

    List of installed K14CE + K15CE library content with a library size of more than 12 GB:

    Installed K14CE + K15CE library content with a library size of more than 4,5 GB and less than 12 GB :

  • BassAddict
    BassAddict Member Posts: 12 Member

    Thanks @PoorFellow - what a super helpful response πŸ˜€

    I'll be starting a new post re hard drives so as to not convolute this post as it might be helpful for others in future.

    Cheers 😎

  • Rico010
    Rico010 Member Posts: 137 Advisor
    edited December 5

    make sure you keep 30% of free space on your hard drive. This is just for the health of the drive. Not turning this thread to an IT HW discussion, you can google more online. Just a friendly advice, so that you can plan the capacity of SSD you are going to buy accordingly.

  • Kymeia
    Kymeia NKS User Library Mod Posts: 5,005 mod

    And bear in mind the reported size is of the installed product but the downloader files also take up at least as much space again as they need to go somewhere on the hard drive and have enough room for unpacking during installation. Once the installation is over they will be deleted but for an install to be successful you need enough space free or it will fail.

  • PoorFellow
    PoorFellow Moderator Posts: 4,866 mod

    Thanks @PoorFellow - what a super helpful response πŸ˜€

    Thank you for the very kind words πŸ˜€

  • Kubrak
    Kubrak Member Posts: 3,067 Expert

    Sidenote. Content may be installed on more discs. Handy if one has multiple discs, but smaller than Content size.

    And bear in mind that amount of content rises pretty much with every Komplete release, that comes every second year….

  • Jojo123
    Jojo123 Member Posts: 361 Pro

    I will also chime in on leaving a healthy amount of free space to give your SSD room to breath. 30% is a good figure, but for your internal system drive I'd recommend much more than that for even a 1TB, for reasons of the installing process.. Nasty things can happen with SSDs if they get close to full, including dramatically slowing down. They also work differently to a HDD with their "garbage collection" routines in the process of cleanups etc.

    I own K14 UCE and on a 500GB internal drive I made sure I only downloaded 1 large library at a time and had well over 1/2 of it free. I had no issues with drive space unlike a heap of people faced with "not enough room to install" errors.

  • BassAddict
    BassAddict Member Posts: 12 Member

    Thanks for the help everyone, much appreciated. It's a bit frustrating that the tech specs of NI's products can't be trusted though.

  • BIF
    BIF Member Posts: 965 Guru

    I'll add some extra-credit knowledge here for SSDs:

    I prefer to keep my static "mostly read-only" VST libraries on separate SSDs that aren't used for any other purpose, and keep my active partitions with lots of read-write activity on their own drives with lots of free space available.

    My logic is that this makes it easier for the drive controller to be more effective in its wear-leveling logic for the active drive. And of course, read-only (or "mostly" read-only) SSDs will never wear out due to exceeding write thresholds for any blocks….because "rewriting" is only happening when you're updating a library or adding a new library.

    That's how I do it. About every 5 to 7 years, I end up building a new machine anyway, and that's when I will swap out my active drive for a brand new drive. The active drive then becomes eligible for static use in the same or another computer.

    I don't know…maybe I'm making it more complicated than it needs to be, especially since the SSD makers are probably always improving their controllers and logic. At this rate, I probably will not outlive any of my drives in any of my computers, and they will all be dancing on my grave one day, lol! 😏

  • BIF
    BIF Member Posts: 965 Guru

    I don't think you can say this with 100% impunity.

    We can't even agree on what a megabyte is. To me, it is 1024 bytes. But to a drive maker, it's 1000 bytes. But we're BOTH wrong, because we haven't even taken blocking factors into account.

    And the difference only grows as you go to gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, and larger denominations.

    It's unfair to blame any vendor for the variances you are seeing. Now if a product is advertised to need 1.2 TB and it ends up needing 4 TB, okay, then somebody goofed up somewhere. But really, you're talking about a couple hundred gig in a universe of a thousand of them.

    Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto, let's call the whole thing off. In other words, I think you're getting upset over something minor.

  • BassAddict
    BassAddict Member Posts: 12 Member

    Hehe, I wouldn't use the words blame or upset exactly. I'm sure NI will let me off with the 800 quid I've just spent, but thanks for the insight 😁

    Interesting to hear someone else's view's on storage strategy though. OMG I just said that, I'm such a nerd πŸ˜‚

Back To Top