What would you consider the max Disk I/O speed to ensure optimal Audio Production performance?

[Maestro777]

My iMac Pro is pretty solid but I am finding that there's a bottleneck that seems to become more apparent at the read/write I/O of the disk where my projects are run from. Seems to be more noticeable when the size of my Projects get fairly large so I'm considering an upgrade from my SATA SSD to a NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen4 SSD drive; but I also can benefit from expanding my Thunderbolt connections as well.

During my research there seem to be only 2 that would fit my budget as practical choices 

OPTION 1: The OWC miniStack STX (Thunderbolt expansion)

OPTION 2: The Tribleet Mac Mini Thunderbolt 3 Dock with NVMe & SATA Slot (Thunderbolt daisy chain)

Though both of these potential solutions have their own specific areas of pros and cons. I am equally concerned with maximum I/O reads and writes as it pertains to my audio production and these 2 options.

Both enclosures support the NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD but whereas the Tribleet advertises being able to leverage full Potential speed of the installed SSD based on PCIe3 standards; the OWC STX won't exceed beyond somewhere around 780 Mbps due to its design.

I use my system to video production but more often for audio; but I'm not 100% certain which of these are more I/O intense. Though I think I read somewhere that Audio Production requires comparatively more system resources than Video.

So all this to present this question.

Anyone have any idea around what I/O speed would be considered more than adequate for intense Audio Production?

If 720 Mbps can suffice for intense Audio Production I would likely consider the STX over the Tribleet simply b/c of the additional ability to expand the number of I/O thunderbolt ports with the support of an SSD. Obviously, I won't get the full potential speed of the NVMe SSD drive but it would be adequate.

If not, I'll like consider the Tribleet or some other alternative.

Thoughts? Input?

What do you guys think is the optimal acceptable I/O speed for Audio production? 

[triplets]

5 hours ago, Maestro777 said:

Though I think I read somewhere that Audio Production requires comparatively more system resources than Video.

It's quite the opposite. Video can bring a computer down faster than audio.

Unless you record everything at 192k sample rate, you don't need SSDs for audio recordings.

A 7200 rpm spinning is plenty for recording at 44 or 48k. Even for 96k.

 

So if you're having issues with your project SSD drives, there's something else going on. A faster SSD drive won't fix it.

[Maestro777]

6 hours ago, triplets said:

It's quite the opposite. Video can bring a computer down faster than audio.

Unless you record everything at 192k sample rate, you don't need SSDs for audio recordings.

A 7200 rpm spinning is plenty for recording at 44 or 48k. Even for 96k.

So if you're having issues with your project SSD drives, there's something else going on. A faster SSD drive won't fix it.

Really? Ok thanks, good to know and that makes the decision easier. Appreciate the comment. I'll try cable replacement to further troubleshoot the perceived issue in the meantime.

Edited June 6, 2022 by Maestro777

[David Nahmani]

Another thing to consider the is the way data is read and written from/to a disk: it's rarely done in a linear fashion. It usually occurs in bursts. So read speed is rarely the bottleneck unless for audio. 

But before we go any further, let's troubleshoot the issue first to see what the culprit here for your symptoms. What exactly occurs when your projects get fairly large? Do you get an alert? Does Logic stop playing? 

I also recommend you use the CPU / Disk monitor to troubleshoot and monitor exactly how much and which resources are being used by your project. 

[MikeRobinson]

Operating systems write data in bursts because they first accumulate the data in memory before committing to write it to disk.  (It will also do delayed-writes in case the memory buffer doesn't become full, so that data never stays in the buffer too long without being written.)  Meanwhile, they usually read ahead when grabbing information from the disk.  But., as others have said, the real issue here will not be the device itself but what is it [that you are doing or requesting ...] that is causing this particular demand-pattern.  You say that you are using SSDs, which don't have the additional physical delays inherent in rotating disk platters.  The system performance monitor would be the best place to start your diagnosis: exactly what is Logic asking the operating system to do?

Edited June 6, 2022 by MikeRobinson

[Maestro777]

So I've taken all the advice and comments from this post and I am still having a problem attempting to identify root cause of my performance issues. The performance meter isn't really giving an indication of what the issue may be no more than showing me the overall load of processing across all 8 cores. Which is showing a fairly average distributed load with no excessive peaks.

However, I did stumble across this peculiarity when I decided to move 1 of my slow performing projects to a NVMe fast flash drive where I received a dialog telling me that the SSD my projects are stored on is out of space. But looking at the available free space on the drive I clearly see approx. 550GB of free space.

And the flash drive I'm attempting to save the project to (1TB) has no other files on it. The Glyph drive can and should admittedly be formatted to the APFS file system but that wouldn't explain why I'm having this particular error.

Anyone have any explanation as to what I may be potentially missing here? The SSD storage I am using is a 2TB drive and there is close to 550GB available free space so something just isn't adding up with those numbers to me. But I'm now suspecting I may be on a path of discovery for the culprit or at least part of the problem if I can understand why this is happening.

I am contemplating just backing up all my projects off of the Glyph drive and if I were to backup a considerable number of projects off this drive and subsequently delete them from it; that "may" alleviate this dialog but I'd like to understand why this is even a problem.

The size of the project I'm trying to copy is 15.35 GB

 

 

Edited June 13, 2022 by Maestro777