Hello everyone.
This thread is quite old, but I would like to know if there are news related to this topic or more tests comparing SSD RAID configurations with independent SSD drives performances.
I recently purchased 4 NVMe SSDs for my iMac that are in an external Thunderbolt 3 enclosure (Netstor NA622TB3). My idea would be to use all 4 disks to create a single RAID 0 volume for orchestral libraries (Spitfire, East West, Vienna, Kontakt).
I know that configuring a RAID 0 with the 4 NVMe disks would improve reading speed, especially when loading large DAW projects (I’m using Logic Pro X) with many instrumental tracks (more than 400). But I do not know if it could cause any problem when reproducing the project, since the Raid would be created by software (MacOS) and I do not know if that could significantly consume processor resources when reading/playing a large amount of samples.
I’m not worried about security or drive failures, since I have another mechanical 8TB hard drive that I use as a backup of all my libraries.
I’ve read in many forums that users don’t recommend Raid configurations with SSD drives for music production/libraries. They argue that it is not necessary to create a RAID volume with SSD drives, since SSDs are very fast in themselves (in fact, NVMe are even faster). It’s also known that the access speed to the disk is more important than the reading rate for our musical purposes. But I don’t know if this is still the case or something has changed in the recent years.
Curiously, all NVMe external Thunderbolt enclosures that I have seen are designed precisely to configure Raid systems. One of the purposes because I would like to have all the libraries in the same RAID volume, beyond the performance, is because it allows me to have everything in a single volume and it’s more easy to configure all the software and also for easier cloning the drive for backup.
On the other hand, if the most advisable thing is to have the 4 NVMe drives independently, even losing approximately 50% of the reading speed, the backup system should also change and I could not simply clone a single volume.
So, is there any news about this? Thanks a lot.