Extremely Slow Sample Library Load Times

[rmills007]

Within the past couple of months, my sample library load times have increased dramatically. Some libraries take several minutes to fully load, (they used to take seconds) and after loading, some sustained notes will get cut off. It feels like read times and efficiency is suffering for some reason.

I'm curious if this might be related to disc space? I have all of my VI's and sample libraries on a single external thunderbolt 2T SSD. As I've been adding to it over the years, it now has 225GB of remaining space. Is that getting too close to full? Does it matter on an SSD? Or, might the drive be going bad?

Or, is there a way to optimize within DP's settings? (Though, I've not changed these).

Any suggestions for testing or improving this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[HCMarkus]

You've got over 10% free space, and this does not include any of your SSD's built-in over-provisioning. So I don't think you have an issue there.

Is Trim enabled for the SSD in question? It should be. If I recall correctly, Trim work on Thunderbolt-connected SSDs.

You can check your VIs' preferences to see how much of a pre-fill you have them set for and try adjusting it. As you probably know, sample players that stream from disk must load a wee bit of each note's samples into RAM. When a note is played, the beginning of the note is played back from RAM (Allowing near-instant response) and the back end of the note is streamed directly from disc. I haven't looked at it for awhile, but recall Kontakt has an adjustment you can make. I set mine as big as it will go, as I have not been getting close to running out of RAM and this approach theoretically should lower the strain on the CPU. But it takes longer to load the samples when I open a session.

[rmills007]

Is Trim enabled for the SSD in question? It should be. If I recall correctly, Trim work on Thunderbolt-connected SSDs.

You can check your VIs' preferences to see how much of a pre-fill you have them set for and try adjusting it.

Thanks. TRIM is enabled on my internal drive, but there's no TRIM Enable/Disabled data available for the external SSD. I'm looking into whether or not it's TRIM compatible.

As for buffering, the slow down is happening across all manufacturers sample players: Kontakt, XLM, Best Services, East West, etc... If there's not a buffering setting within DP, I suppose it must be drive related.

[mikehalloran]

If your external is connected via Thunderbolt or eSATA,run sudo trimforce enable in Terminal.

Some NVMe blades connected over TB such as a Samsung X5 will not need this but any SATA drives will.

TRIM is not supported over USB-anything.

[rmills007]

TRIM is not supported over USB-anything.

Good to know! Thanks.