Anyone Using NVMe SSD in Their DAW?

[Jay Soren]

On 3/18/2019 at 5:59 PM, Jim Hurley said:

I have 8 cores/16 threads i9-9900k

here are some benchmarks for the drives:

Hi Jim,

I am building a PC myself, and also going with the i9-9900k. I came across this thread via Google. I was just wondering what motherboard you decided to go with? I can't seem to find a decent LGA 1151 motherboard with a good amount of m.2 slots and multiple PCIe lanes. Those benchmark speeds are amazing.

Also, the Samsung SSD, I'm assuming it's NVMe as well? I.E: this?

Thank you for any help!

Edited March 28, 2020 by Jay Soren

[William W. Saunders, Jr.]

ASRock Taichi MOBOs have three M.2 slots.  Thunderbolt too.

I have an X299 and a Z390, one at home and one in my studio.   I have M.2 NVME SSDs for OS, Audio and Samples in both.

Both boards and all 6 SSD's are working great for me.

[Jay Soren]

Awesome. Thank you for the recommendations. I was already looking at the Z390 but haven't heard of the X299 - going to check it out. The one thing that frustrates me is that when you utilize a m.2 slot, 2 regular SATA slots get disabled (at least with the Z390). I need a lot of storage space for Kontakt instruments, and 4TB isn't going to cut it. I should in theory be able to get two normal 4TB SATA drives to work as well though. 

Also I think if you use the third m.2 slot, it disables PCIe lanes.

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

7 hours ago, Jay Soren said:

I need a lot of storage space for Kontakt instruments, and 4TB isn't going to cut it. I should in theory be able to get two normal 4TB SATA drives to work as well though. 

Someone over at VI Control did a load of tests with Kontakt and whether it performed better on an NVME drive or not.  TLDR: It didn't -  so I chose a Samsung Evo SSD for my Libs and the NVME is for programs and OS

CBB loads in a few seconds. Kontakt Instruments I've tried so far are pretty snappy as long as you batch re-save.    

[Jay Soren]

Interesting, good to know! That should save me some money then in my new build. Thanks for your help.

[StudioNSFW]

I have a different solution for storage so the PC just boots off a SATA attached SSD.  Fast enough for the OS and storage is offboard on a frankly silly fast iSCSI SAN that i got the best kind of deal on.

That said, my big Mac Pro (A Video IO Monster running a 4K BlackMagic capture card) lost its original boot drive, and so I installed a NVMe drive.  That silly drive is up to snuff for 4K capture at 60 fps with no dropped frames. Probably overkill for throughput on any DAW, but if I was building a DAW PC again I'd go NVMe for the OS drive.