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Comment by merkaloid | Hacker News Reader

Looks like its almost completely worthless for consumers. Real world performance is the same as NVMe drives yet at much higher $/GB

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That's... not at all what I'm seeing. Very broadly: at high queue depths and on mostly sequential data, it's competitive with and slightly better than the flash devices. At low queue depths and on random data (pretty much exactly where "consumers" live) it's much, much faster. Like, 4x the scores in s a bunch of those tests.

Now... to be fair consumers applications in the modern cloudworld are generally not storage-limited. So maybe your point is defensible in a specious sense. But as actual performance measurements go, these really are ripping fast drives.

> We've never experienced a system that felt as fast and responsive as our workstation with the 900P as the operating system drive, and that’s largely due to the explosive random read performance at low queue depths. At QD1, the 900P is nearly 4x faster than the Samsung 960 EVO 1TB

Are we reading the same article?

I would expect anybody working with DAWs and sample libraries (extremely low latency random read performance needed, meaning every note playing can be a sample anywhere on your drive) would jump at these, both pros and amateurs.

I've been thinking about moving my Kontakt libraries to a fast SSD. Would you see a difference noticeable between this and Samsung 960 for that purpose?

I'm assuming it depends from the size of your template (i.e. how many samples at a time you're using). For not huge templates you can already run kontakt fully purged off the SSD, but I would assume with this the limiter would be pretty much entirely the CPU... still I don't know of anybody having done any DAW tests with XPoint and large sample libraries (say, Spitfire etc.), would be interesting to see what kind of polyphony a high core CPU with this would be able to achieve...

Some stress testing with older SSD's here - https://vi-control.net/community/threads/performance-to-be-e...

I use Spitfire stuff, mainly Albion, but the voice requirements these guys have is on another level. The Optane speedup would certainly mean more voices, and perhaps remove the need to have separate SSD's for each large kontakt library?

yeah, vi-control is a really good forum for these discussions :) I am waiting for a post from Chimuelo saying he's tried optane, as he seems to regularly try new hardware. I would think that optane would be amazing for this and would basically make your CPU the limiter as opposed to your storage, on the other hand it makes me wonder if Kontakt can take full advantage of this.

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