Where to put Sound Libraries?

[johnnyv]

Hey all,

I've bought a new Mac Pro. It arrives today.

I have a lot sound libraries for Kontakt, Spectrasonics, Spitfire Audio, etc. Because of that, and because Sound Libraries are, for the most part, read only, I loaded the computer up with 8TB of factory installed flash storage. Should last me a while (haha!).

The question I have is whether I should load, for instance, the Kontakt libraries in their default location somewhere in the System portion of the storage or whether I should create a dedicated "Sound Libraries" either Folder or Partition. Does any of you have any experience with this?

For the last many years, I have set aside a separate hard drive for these libraries, but it is a small bit of a pain to keep directing Applications to point to a location other than their default location, either during install or use.

I know that all of us have gotten used to having separate drives for various things, and I do plan to have separate M.2 cards for Client files (which are most often Read/Write) and backup files. But I don't know whether, with super fast Flash Storage, the old paradigms about separate drives for this and that hold as much water as they used to.

Anyway, any thoughts on where to install Sound Libraries? Default location so I never have to even think about it or always on a separate "partition" of the 8TB flash storage?

Haha, does the flash storage even allow for partitioning?

[Sardi]

I’d keep them in a seperate location purely for organisational purposes.

I find it much easier to just have the boot drive with apps etc. and projects on another drive and libraries on another. It makes cloning and restoring boot drives much simpler and means I can also unplug my audio drive and use it with my laptop when away from the studio. The latter probably won’t come into play for you as your storage is all internal.

So yeah, my vote would be keep the libraries in a seperate partition and just point the apps to the location. You only need to do it once.


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[itsjustmeee123]

Here's what I've discovered as the most bulletproof option ... get 2 Samsung T5 SSDs. Use one for your sample libraries and the other for your work drive. Then get a large hard drive and partition it to back up both the T5 drives nightly by using a program like Superduper. And it's not hard to direct your VI plugins to the external drive. Once you set the location in preferences (like within Native Access), you're good to go. You only have to do it once.

[JFreak]

Yes you will need backups. SSD will break eventually without a warning and should that happen you will kick yourself to the butt if you need to reinstall all those terabytes.

[johnnyv]

Hey everyone, thanks for the great suggestions so far. Keep them coming!

[briaboy]

Originally Posted by itsjustmeee123

Here's what I've discovered as the most bulletproof option ... get 2 Samsung T5 SSDs. Use one for your sample libraries and the other for your work drive. Then get a large hard drive and partition it to back up both the T5 drives nightly by using a program like Superduper. And it's not hard to direct your VI plugins to the external drive. Once you set the location in preferences (like within Native Access), you're good to go. You only have to do it once.

What would you recommend as a "large hard drive"? Thanks!

[massivekerry]

I admit, I don’t and won’t have a new Mac Pro for awhile, so my thoughts will be theoretical, as opposed to practice-based.

Is your 8TB of flash storage considered “one” drive? Is it the Apple Storage?

Apple NVRAM chips in their pro machines are really beefy and robust (which is part of why they cost so much to upgrade the storage), so (in a new model of thinking) you *might* be okay with creating a Folder (or partition if the new OS/storage system allows) on that 8TB to hold your sample libraries. I’d want a dedicated drive or folder for organizational (and ease of backup!) purposes, no matter what.

So the only downside you might really have is bandwidth. The MP cites “Up to 3.4GB/s for sequential Read and Write on the Built-in storage. That’s pretty good. SATA-III is only up to 600MB/s. So, the new MP storage is over 5x as fast. But how much stuff might you be reading/writing to/from at the same time? If you’re running a multi-stream 8k video, hundreds of active VIs, blah blah blah, you might have the potential to max out the bandwidth. Might. You could add an NVM storage PCIe card, like the latest OWC Accelsior , and potentially get up to 6GB/s on that device, which you could use for all of your samples, potentially freeing up your onboard storage bandwidth for… other things. Plus if the machine ever craps out for some reason, you can pull the card out and stick it in a new machine (which you can not do with the built-in MP storage)

But you’re probably going to be totally fine in most cases to just use the built-in 8TB. If you need more, I suspect it will become obvious.

[Michael Carnes]

I use the Sonnet M2 card (PCI card) as a RAID-0. It's actually considerably faster than the internal solid state drive on the Mac Pro. I've not had a problem with redirecting the installers to that secondary drive: Once I set the target, installers and updaters remember from that point onward.

[itsjustmeee123]

Originally Posted by briaboy

What would you recommend as a "large hard drive"? Thanks!

These have been in my studio for years now and are pretty durable. Just make sure you get enough space to partition it with room to spare. You can back up your OS drive, work drive and samples all on one .... then if REALLY want to be safe, just back up the backup from time to time. I don’t bother but I’m sure a lot of people do.

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[musicman691]

I'm a separate drives kind of guy. SSD for system, another SSD for samples and a big spinner for sessions. Backups done to external drives once a week using Carbon Copy Cloner.


As for pointing a vi to where samples are stored you only have to do that once on install. The common wisdom with stuff for Kontakt is to open it in standalone first to make/test changes and then open in PT. It can work if you skip this step but don't be surprised if you have issues.