Whether you're laying down audio tracks, hosting multi-gigabyte sample libraries or working with humungous 4K video files, chances are you're going to find yourself straining against the limits of your storage space soon enough. These days there are several options for expansion, and this article is designed to give you a quick overview, with an emphasis on what's most important for the modern music or audio production professional.
If you'd like a quick summary of how best to kit out your new OPUS 101 audio PC, skip to the bottom of this article for our recommendations.
The Racehorse: NVMe Drives
Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is a relatively recent technology that is now the most common option found in new PCs—and indeed our default option here at OPUS 101. An NVMe drive is essentially an SSD (Solid-State Drive) with the brakes taken off. Whereas traditional SSDs like the ones discussed below are bottlenecked by the relatively slow SATA bus inherited from old-school HDDs, an NVMe drive transfers data via your motherboard's PCIe bus. This is the same high-speed interface used for very high-throughput components such as graphics cards, and is capable of insanely fast read/write speeds—we're talking up to 12 to 25 times faster than SATA, depending on the PCIe generation.
A more detailed breakdown of how SSDs work is found below, but the biggest difference between NVMe and older SATA SSDs is in how they handle data requests. Traditionally, commands to a storage device (such as "read this block" or "write that block") were held in a single "queue" by your host controller, and commands in this queue were processed one at a time. This was because SATA was designed for old spinning disk drives that only had a single read-and-write head capable of executing these commands. A SATA drive could hold up to 32 commands in this queue at a time, while enterprise-grade SAS drives could hold up to 254 commands.
But when there is no longer a spinning disk and no physical read-and-write head is involved, there is no longer the need for all these commands to be executed one after another. NVMe takes advantage of this fact by offering not just one queue, but a staggering sixty-four thousand queues, each of which can hold sixty-four thousand commands. Because each queue can be processed independently of the others, reading and writing data is orders of magnitude more efficient.
So does this translate into a real-world performance improvement for an audio PC? Yes and no. Even though some samplers like Kontakt are not fully optimised to take advantage of NVMe's multi-queue capabilities, an NVMe drive can still load samples into memory noticeably faster than SATA SSD—and if you run a purged template you should also see a substantial boost to direct-from-disk (DFD) streaming.
You may sometimes see NVMe drives referred to as m.2 drives, but this is a bit of a misnomer: m.2 in fact refers to the form factor of the drive—a thin, flat rectangle with some pins at one end and a semi-circular mounting hole at the other. Good old-fashioned SATA SSDs can come in this form factor too, so make sure you specify "m.2 NVMe" when searching for a new drive, as there's little point in using one of the two or three precious m.2 slots on your motherboard for a drive that's still bottlenecked by SATA limitations. (All the m.2 drives we stock at OPUS 101 are NVMe drives and vice versa.)
To complicate matters, there are multiple types of NVMe drive—because, as PCIe bus technology has advanced in recent years, so too have NVMe drives. PCIe Gen 4 drives are capable of sequential read speeds of up to ~7,000MB/s—vs ~560MB/s for SATA SSD—while PCIe Gen 5 drives are double that speed again, topping out at a whopping ~14,000MB/s. As explained below, sequential read speeds aren't massively relevant to streaming sample libraries, but depending on how many cores your CPU has, you can see dramatic increases in random read speeds with these drives as well. All OPUS 101 machines can take either PCIe Gen 4 or PCIe Gen 5 drives, but the latter do of course carry a higher price tag.
The Trusty Old Workhorse: Solid-State Drives (SSD)
"Solid-State Drive" (or SSD) is actually a blanket term that covers both the older SATA 2.5″ drives like the one pictured above and the newer NVMe drives found in more recent builds. For the sake of convenience, though, I'm going to use the term SSD to refer specifically to the older SATA-based drives many of us are familiar with, and use NVMe to refer to the newer, much faster storage found in modern systems.
While SSDs are now largely overshadowed by NVMe, they still represent a massive improvement over the even older spinning drives ("hard disks" or HDDs—see below) that were once the mainstay of our computers. Since both SSDs and NVMe drives fall under the "solid-state" umbrella, it's worth looking at what makes solid-state technology so transformative—especially for those of us working in music production.
The first and most significant advantage is speed. For composers dealing with sample libraries and large DAW templates, streaming samples to memory from a traditional spinning HDD can prove a significant bottleneck. To understand why, it's important to understand how SSDs physically differ from HDDs.
An HDD consists of a spindle which holds multiple circular disks called "platters". These platters spin around past a read-and-write head, which stores and retrieves data. To read data from the disk, the read-and-write head needs to move into the correct position and then wait for the disk to spin around to the right sector, where the data it wants to retrieve is located. The speed at which a disk can spin (its RPM) is the main factor that determines how fast the drive is.
These sorts of drives are most efficient when reading data that's all in the same physical location on the disk. Think of it like a turntable, where the HDD platters are an LP and the read-and-write head is a stylus attached to a tone arm. Your life is going to be a lot easier if you can just drop the needle at one point on the record, sit back and enjoy those sweet analogue sounds. That's what we'd call a "sequential read", because all the data you are pulling off the spinning disk is all sitting in the equivalent of a single groove.
But imagine your data is scattered in tiny chunks all over the surface of that record. In order to read this data, the read-and-write head has to move, wait for the disk to spin to the right spot, read a block of data, then move again, wait another revolution, read the next block of data, and so on. It's hopelessly inefficient.
Unfortunately for us, this is how samples are organised. Every sample—meaning every round robin of every articulation of every note in every dynamic layer—is a block of data. And because most music isn't just chromatic scales going up and down, it's very unlikely your samples are going to be physically located close together when you ask your computer to read them off your disk. This is called a "random read", and it's the area where SSDs offer a huge advantage over HDDs.
An SSD has no moving parts. It consists instead of a series of cells that can each be set to different values. In the simplest types of SSDs—which use single-level cell (SLC) memory—each cell is either a 1 or a 0, on or off. Newer technology allows for multi-level cells (MLC) to store two bits, triple-level cells (TLC) to store three bits, and quad-level cells (QLC) to store four bits. Each of these technologies increases the amount of data a drive can store for the price you pay, but may have speed and reliability trade-offs. All the NVMe and SSD drives we use in our builds are high-quality TLC drives, which we think is the best compromise.
Because there is no read-and-write head and no spinning platters, an SSD is much more efficient than an HDD at finding random bits of data scattered around its surface. And by "much more efficient", we're talking in the region of 50 times faster. (This is all a bit of a simplification, of course, but if you're curious, there is a useful discussion of the three factors—throughput, IOPS and latency—that affect speed differences between HDD and SSD over at The SSD Review.)
The long-and-the-short of it is that if you have a lot of sample libraries, loading them into memory or (especially) streaming them direct from disk is going to be significantly faster using an SSD than it would be with an HDD.
There are several other factors that make SSDs a much better choice for audio professionals than the old-school HDDs we used to hear constantly whirring away. For a start, because there's no spinning, there's no noise. They also tend to be more reliable. And the lack of friction means they consume less power and run much cooler than HDDs. That doesn't mean there is no place for HDDs in the studio (see below) but it does mean that your bread-and-butter storage solution should be an SSD of some sort.
The vast majority of SSDs, like the one pictured, are properly called SATA 2.5″ SSDs. SATA is a type of bus interface that connects your storage device to the rest of your system, while 2.5″ relates to the physical dimensions of the drive. For many years, they were the most cost-effective forms of Solid-State Drive you could get, and when people talk about "SSDs" this is what they usually mean—even if, technically speaking, an NVMe drive is just another type of SSD.
Good for the Knacker's Yard? HDDs (Hard Disk Drives)
While we don't recommend HDDs for system disks or sample libraries, they do have one advantage: price. You can buy a multi-terabyte HDD for a fraction of the cost of a multi-terabyte NVMe or SSD, making them useful for backups—especially for large project files or system images. However, because HDDs are slow and noisy compared to SSDs, you don't want to rely on them for active projects, and you definitely don't want to use them as sample drives. Running automated backups overnight is always a sensible idea, though, and while we recommend using a cloud backup provider like BackBlaze, an on-site backup can add an extra layer of protection.
At OPUS 101, we don't offer HDDs in our standard configurations, as NVMe drives and SSDs are now the superior choices for almost all workflows. However, if you need an HDD for bulk storage, get in touch and we can arrange a suitable option.
One word of caution if you are interested in buying an HDD: not all drives are created equal. Some manufacturers use a technology called Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) to maximize capacity, but these drives are prone to slowdowns and errors compared to Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR)/Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) drives. If you're using an HDD for backups, it's best to avoid SMR models.
These days, it's fairly easy to check whether a drive is SMR or CMR—just Google the model name along with "CMR" or "PMR" to be sure. In general, SMR is more common in large-capacity 2.5″ drives (laptops), while 3.5″ desktop drives are more often CMR—but it's always worth checking before buying.
Which Drives to Use for What: Our Recommendation
Depending on the motherboard, your OPUS 101 system will have up to four m.2 slots for NVMe drives and four-to-eight SATA connectors for SSDs or HDDs. All our systems come with two drives as standard: a system disk (for Windows and your applications) plus a storage disk (for sample libraries, projects or both). So what type of storage should you use for which purpose?
System Disk: Your system disk should always be an NVMe drive. NVMe is significantly faster than SATA SSDs, more reliable, and now the standard for modern PCs—including all OPUS 101 machines. A 1TB NVMe Gen 4 drive is ideal for Windows, your DAW, plugins, and other applications. A Gen 5 drive may offer some performance gains, but the difference in every day use will be marginal—you'll get better use from Gen 5 slots by dedicating them to large-scale projects, particularly those involving 4K video.
Sample Libraries: The faster you can stream samples, the better your performance. NVMe drives are the best choice for this since they dramatically reduce load times and allow for lower buffer settings in samplers like Kontakt. Large or slow-loading libraries should always go on NVMe storage. If you run out of m.2 slots, a high-capacity SATA SSD can still work well, but at the cost of slightly longer load times. As always, get the biggest drive you can afford—because sample library collections have an annoying habit of growing exponentially!
Projects and Documents (optional): NVMe is preferable if you're working with large projects, especially those involving high track counts, lots of uncompressed audio files, or 4K video. If you don't have any available m.2 slots, a SATA SSD is still a good option for storing DAW projects and session files. Ideally, keep your projects on a separate disk from your system drive to reduce risk and improve organisation. (Regular backups also help here!)
Backup Drive: It's never a bad idea to keep backups of your important files. Cloud backups, like Backblaze or Dropbox, are ideal, but an on-site backup is a good extra layer of protection. While an HDD can work as a backup drive, our preference is still to use NVMe or SATA SSDs wherever possible, as they are less prone to corruption or degradation. If you do opt for an HDD, make sure to look for one with PMR or CMR technology rather than the newer SMR.
In summary:
- Use NVMe for your system disk—it's the fastest and most reliable option
- Use NVMe for sample libraries—or SATA SSDs if all your m.2 slots are full
- Use NVMe (if possible) for projects and documents—but SATA SSDs work well in most cases too
- Backup your data, preferably with cloud storage—but an HDD will do in a pinch