Using SSD for sample streaming in Kontakt

[woodslanding]

Hi all!

I've been enjoying reading all the ssd tests on this site, but I have a question that these tests do not seem to address.

Is anyone here familiar with large scale sampled audio?

I'm going to get an SSD to stream my Kontakt sample libraries for live performance. The way Kontakt works, I'll be reading hundreds of audio files off disk at a time, and it's crucial that WORST CASE read performance be as high as possible. I could care less about best case or even average performance, and writes will be all but non-existent. The default for Kontakt is to retrieve the data in 60kb chunks, but I could change that up or down a bit if it would yield better performance. I'm currently using a year-old 180 gb intel SSD, and this is the first time sample retrieval hasn't been the speed bottleneck in my system. However, I'm getting a faster system, so that may change again, and I'd like to get the 256gb ssd that would be most effective for this kind of read performance at the $200 or under mark.

Any thoughts specifically what I should be looking for in the AnandTech SSD tests? I know mine is an unusual use case!

99% of the data on the drive will be read only for months or even years at a stretch.... so I'm not worried about write-related reliability issues.

Thanks for any tips!
-eric

 

[Cerb]

The Plextor M5 Pro, Corsair Neutron GTX, Crucial M500, and Samsung 840 Pro, would all be good choices, IMO. The Samsung 840 Evo might be just fine, too--I'm really not sure, for this. It might actually be one of the better options, though, on top of being one of the cheapest.

If you can track performance in Kontakt, try using 64KB and 128KB, just to have nice round (in binary) values, and see how that works on the new drive.

I would guess, for a read-most workload like that, and with 60KB being the common read size, that it probably won't matter, as long you get one that isn't really low on app benchmarks. But, at the same time, it's not a lot more money to get one known to maintain its performance pretty well.