Are my internal NVMe drives causing PT to crash when recording multiple tracks?

[Darryl Ramm]

I know large RAID volumes help make stuff easier and many folks are able to use RAID with great results but I keep repeating my advice to KISS, just use JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks). Too many data loss problems are caused by user error configuring/managing RAID. And yes I know there will be cases where it makes sense, but I think it's healthy to consider pushing back/not just doing it without weighing the trade offs.

While large volumes might sure stuff easy, I doubt very much that Pro Tools users will see real performance advantages by striping NVMe drives... (stuff that impacts actual use, not a benchmark)... old Slow Tools just ain't keeping up with these modern drives... and backup/restore software likely can't either.

[loud neighbor]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

I know large RAID volumes help make stuff easier and many folks are able to use RAID with great results but I keep repeating my advice to KISS, just use JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks). Too many data loss problems are caused by user error configuring/managing RAID. And yes I know there will be cases where it makes sense, but I think it's healthy to consider pushing back/not just doing it without weighing the trade offs.

While large volumes might sure stuff easy, I doubt very much that Pro Tools users will see real performance advantages by striping NVMe drives... (stuff that impacts actual use, not a benchmark)... old Slow Tools just ain't keeping up with these modern drives... and backup/restore software likely can't either.

Update from the home office:

I've finally backed everything up from my 8TB NVMe session drive to a couple of 8TB spindles and reformatted the NVMe drive using Apple's Disk Utility. Per Darryl's suggestion above I decided to do JBOD (or "concatenated" which is a new big word for me) and (carefully) selected the 4 2TB blades that would comprise the new volume. I honestly never knew you could assemble JBOD into a single volume. Now I know.

So far so good. Tracking drums, etc. without issue. Will report back if there are any digressions but it looks like the moral of the story is that my particular combination of NVMe + RAID O + SoftRaid wasn't playing well with PT.

Best of luck to anyone else who might encounter this and thanks to the DUC for the support.

[Darryl Ramm]

Great you have stuff working!

Just an anal-retentive comment on naming, strictly concatenation is not JBOD, JBOD is just using each disk separately. I'm really a fan of JBOD and just laying out content onto large drives (and I can't imagine buying < 2TB NVMe SSD drives nowadays). I've seen too many mistakes caused by config or user errors over the years. Luckily at least with large VI libraries losing them is not like losing work, so concatenate away. For sessions and content I like keeping them on one drive (often the boot SSD on modern Macs) that and having them really well backed up. Concatenating or striping all drives together and throwing samples, sessions etc. onto them would be my last choice from a reliability/robustness viewpoint.