Tuning storage and sharing of audio sample files

aibus

Cadet
Joined
May 11, 2019
Messages
3
Dear Community,

As a hobbyist film composer, I use a number of sampling libraries that consist of a large number of small, individual sample files. I've now decided to build a new NAS using FreeNAS and store all the sample content on it. My setup is as follows:
  • Gigabyte GA-X68XP-UD3
  • Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2700K CPU @ 3.50GHz
  • 32GB RAM
  • Intel X550-T2 Dual-Port 10gbit NIC
  • 3 SSDs (different sizes) in a Raid 0 configuration (striped?)
  • 1Gbit Connection to Switch
  • 10Gbit direct connection to my workstation (ASUS XG-C100C 10GBit, macOS High Sierra)
A dataset on my SSD RAID is mounted on my workstation via AFP (SMB and NSF were way slower).

The transfer speeds (measured with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test) are nice, about 500MB/s write and around 430MB/s read (why is read slower than write? Because of my raid level?). So the 10GBE seems to work nicely.

When I try to load my sample libraries though, it takes 5-10x as long as when I load them from a local SSD drive. I have already tried different compression levels on the dataset (lx4 and off), without any noticeable difference in speed. I think the problem is that the sample libraries usually consist of many small files (1-20MB).

Is there a way to tweak the transfer speed? Otherwise my whole undertaking would practically be in vain and a lot of money wasted.

Write speed and storage size is not an issue for me, I just like to optimize it for read.

Thanks for any help!

Cheers,
Remo
 
Last edited:

aibus

Cadet
Joined
May 11, 2019
Messages
3
I think I‘m very close to a solution, yes :) I‘ll happily post all the details once I‘m sure it works well!
 

SweetAndLow

Sweet'NASty
Joined
Nov 6, 2013
Messages
6,421
Afp is dead you should move away from it. I take it your desktop is osx? Apple has switched to using smb as their protocol of choice.
 
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