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Post by guitfiddler on Nov 29, 2023 13:53:26 GMT -6
I have a huge library of VI’s. It gets ridiculous at times having 4-5 SSD drives dongled off and sitting on my desk! It drives me crazy! I thought about making sound drives for my favorite software one for piano/synths and one for my VI drums sounds. Then you will need SSD drives to record to. I have a backup drive that stores my stuff I don’t want to lose that I’ll just move everything to. Why not have a dedicated SSD drive for each project? www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicmultidock What do you think about this product, and are any of you using any Blackmaguc design products and really liking them? |
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Post by drumsound on Nov 29, 2023 13:59:25 GMT -6
Looks pertty cool. Does the price including disks?
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Post by guitfiddler on Nov 29, 2023 14:02:06 GMT -6
Looks pertty cool. Does the price including disks? I haven’t checked, however I doubt it. This thing looks to be a very good solution for me. Drive 1 - Record drive from the DAW Drive 2 - Sound files for Drum VI’s Drive 3 - Sound files for Piano/Synth VI’s Drive 4 - Backup or anything really. I have another drive for backup that can be plugged in anytime I need files backed up. I’m still doing some research on this, and have found that other multiple drive bays are north of a $1000 and it looks like this company has a lot of really cool professional audio/video media solutions. |
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Post by Johnkenn on Nov 29, 2023 14:26:41 GMT -6
What’s the price? The studio I use a lot has one of these.
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ericn
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Balance Engineer
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Post by ericn on Nov 29, 2023 14:29:27 GMT -6
Black magic makes excellent products but, for what you are trying to do I’ll bet you can find a generic IT equivalent that will do the same thing for less. As to how it works for audio I’m sure some where there is a Blackmagic/ Fairlight post house using them, problem is most Audio/ Music dealers won’t know them.
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Post by longscale on Nov 29, 2023 14:45:49 GMT -6
I have an older version of this product (thunderbolt). works flawlessly for my needs. I like it and would buy it again.
I think this is around $615 for a price (no drives) according to the website.
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Post by longscale on Nov 29, 2023 18:37:06 GMT -6
For extra context I use this rack unit in a similar way as your intention. I have two SSDs that hold VI libs. The other two drives are backup drives that I copy a backup of session files to both (my poor mans replica 2 method). I've been burned by a bad backup drive, so I keep two copies now. There are cheaper solutions - but this one is solid and I like the single rack space and no fan (at least mine has no fan - no clue if newer version does). I do not use any of the RAID capabilities. I use this as a JBOD.
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ericn
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Post by ericn on Nov 29, 2023 19:58:20 GMT -6
What’s the price? The studio I use a lot has one of these. $615 is MAP. |
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Post by Tbone81 on Nov 29, 2023 20:35:00 GMT -6
Looks like an element solution…might have to grab one, I have a single space in my rack that would be perfect for this.
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ericn
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Balance Engineer
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Post by ericn on Nov 29, 2023 21:25:14 GMT -6
Looks pertty cool. Does the price including disks? No unfortunately. |
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Post by drbill on Nov 29, 2023 21:55:48 GMT -6
Price seems fair for what you get. This is definitely on my list.
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Post by chumley56 on Nov 29, 2023 22:28:08 GMT -6
I considered buying one of these before deciding to go a different route. My great hesitation was that the bright red rings would make me crazy if they really light up to show drive activity. It's probably not a big deal for most people, but it just seems a bit out of scale to the function. I like to work in a darkened space.
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Post by mcirish on Nov 30, 2023 6:51:10 GMT -6
It looks cool but that's pretty expensive if you ask me. There has to be a cheaper solution. Maybe Startech makes something like it. Probably wouldn't be rack mounted though.
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Post by doubledog on Nov 30, 2023 8:41:53 GMT -6
Rackmount is cool, but for 1/5 of the price you could get something like this.... www.amazon.com/ORICO-External-Docking-Duplicator-Function/dp/B07MQCDVJ2SATA SSDs have a max (sequential data) transfer rate of about 550MB/s. USB 3.0 is about 5Gbps (which is about 600MB/s - and after protocol overhead is closer to 450MB/s) so you won't get full bandwidth. The blackmagic device says it is USB 3.2 (assuming it is using 2 lanes), which has a theoretical max of 10Gbps (or around 1200MB/s, or probably more like 1000MB/s after overhead). This also assumes your computer has a USB 3.2 (SuperSpeedPlus) port that is capable of doing the dual-lane USB3 (otherwise if its only single-lane, then you get the same as USB 3.0). but you are still not getting full bandwidth of 4-5 drives simultaneous over USB. personally, I have my samples loaded on a 1Gb NVMe drive. I probably don't have as big a library as you, but the NVMe drive can read much faster than the SATA drives. This one is an M.2 mounted on a PCIe card (which is in a PCIe slot in my system - not always an option for everyone) I also have one internally as my boot drive. |
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Post by the other mark williams on Nov 30, 2023 10:24:22 GMT -6
Rackmount is cool, but for 1/5 of the price you could get something like this.... www.amazon.com/ORICO-External-Docking-Duplicator-Function/dp/B07MQCDVJ2SATA SSDs have a max (sequential data) transfer rate of about 550MB/s. USB 3.0 is about 5Gbps (which is about 600MB/s - and after protocol overhead is closer to 450MB/s) so you won't get full bandwidth. The blackmagic device says it is USB 3.2 (assuming it is using 2 lanes), which has a theoretical max of 10Gbps (or around 1200MB/s, or probably more like 1000MB/s after overhead). This also assumes your computer has a USB 3.2 (SuperSpeedPlus) port that is capable of doing the dual-lane USB3 (otherwise if its only single-lane, then you get the same as USB 3.0). but you are still not getting full bandwidth of 4-5 drives simultaneous over USB. personally, I have my samples loaded on a 1Gb NVMe drive. I probably don't have as big a library as you, but the NVMe drive can read much faster than the SATA drives. This one is an M.2 mounted on a PCIe card (which is in a PCIe slot in my system - not always an option for everyone) I also have one internally as my boot drive. It looks to me like what the Blackmagic Multidock can do, though, is have slots 1 and 2 on one USB 3.2 bus and slots 3 and 4 on a second USB 3.2 bus. Assuming you know your computer's USB bus structure and are plugging those into two separate busses on your computer. So you could, for instance, set up like this: - Slot 1: Recording drive
- Slot 2: Clone of Recording drive
- Slot 3: Samples drive
- Slot 4: Clone of Samples drive - or do a RAID with Slot 3 to use more of the 10Gbps bandwidth
Then your samples would be streaming from/to one bus, and your audio recording from/to another bus.
(Still, you're certainly right that NVMe drives are the way to go with samples storage whenever possible due to the speed of the PCI bus.)
But there is an elegance to the BM Multidock that I find attractive. Like a lot of BM stuff... |
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Post by svart on Nov 30, 2023 10:42:14 GMT -6
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Post by ab101 on Nov 30, 2023 11:17:45 GMT -6
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Post by lee on Nov 30, 2023 12:00:14 GMT -6
Rackmount is cool, but for 1/5 of the price you could get something like this.... www.amazon.com/ORICO-External-Docking-Duplicator-Function/dp/B07MQCDVJ2SATA SSDs have a max (sequential data) transfer rate of about 550MB/s. USB 3.0 is about 5Gbps (which is about 600MB/s - and after protocol overhead is closer to 450MB/s) so you won't get full bandwidth. The blackmagic device says it is USB 3.2 (assuming it is using 2 lanes), which has a theoretical max of 10Gbps (or around 1200MB/s, or probably more like 1000MB/s after overhead). This also assumes your computer has a USB 3.2 (SuperSpeedPlus) port that is capable of doing the dual-lane USB3 (otherwise if its only single-lane, then you get the same as USB 3.0). but you are still not getting full bandwidth of 4-5 drives simultaneous over USB. personally, I have my samples loaded on a 1Gb NVMe drive. I probably don't have as big a library as you, but the NVMe drive can read much faster than the SATA drives. This one is an M.2 mounted on a PCIe card (which is in a PCIe slot in my system - not always an option for everyone) I also have one internally as my boot drive. yeah I was going to suggest that the Blackmagic box, while nicely designed, maybe isn’t the fastest format available. |
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Post by ml on Nov 30, 2023 12:28:50 GMT -6
It's definitely cool, but it looks like its more geared for someone who is swapping drives a lot i.e. a video editor (maybe that's you?). If your drives are always plugged in, then there are cheaper solutions including buying / building a DAS which can hold a ton of drives. Serverbuilds.net is a great resource for storage solutions.
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Post by dok on Nov 30, 2023 14:37:29 GMT -6
Yes, this is about as fast as you're going to realistically get with the NVMe/thunderbolt combo at the moment, as far as I know. And it's pretty fast! |
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Post by ab101 on Nov 30, 2023 20:29:21 GMT -6
Yes, this is about as fast as you're going to realistically get with the NVMe/thunderbolt combo at the moment, as far as I know. And it's pretty fast! Thank you. Sadly, I only have one thunderbolt slot. But I think I can add more by a PCI-e card. |
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Post by bentley on Nov 30, 2023 20:43:38 GMT -6
Have an older TB2 version. A bit pricey but works like a champ and keeps the clutter down. 2 audio drives, sample drive, and a backup.
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Post by bentley on Nov 30, 2023 20:46:27 GMT -6
I considered buying one of these before deciding to go a different route. My great hesitation was that the bright red rings would make me crazy if they really light up to show drive activity. It's probably not a big deal for most people, but it just seems a bit out of scale to the function. I like to work in a darkened space. Honestly never notice the rings blinking. I think the photo exaggerates how bright they are. Mine is in the rack to my front right and rarely catches my eye. |
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Post by kcatthedog on Nov 30, 2023 23:41:09 GMT -6
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Post by thehightenor on Dec 1, 2023 2:32:49 GMT -6
1. OS on 1TB nvme
2. Clone of OS on 1TB nvme (instant OS recall)
3. Audio and Cubase projects 4TB SSD
4. Mirror of drive 3 for back up 4TB SSD
5. 2nd Mirror of drive 3 (critical digital should be backed up 3x)
6. Sample drive 4TB nvme
7. 2nd Sample drive 4TB nvme
The nvme drives are all running at 7GB per second, which works well for sample libraries.
I’m on PC so all the drives are inside the tower case.
But still, we all seem to be going for a similar solution in terms of the number of drives.
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