There was once a time when we audio folk did not have to worry about super-fast drive speeds for our working drives, as audio data, by comparison to video or graphics was very small. However, those days are long since past as, with the advent of immersive audio and massive track counts, DAW sessions can often be tens if not hundreds of Gigabytes in size. Add to that the use of vast orchestral sample libraries and it can often take a number of minutes to load a session. Fortunately, the folks at Other World Computing (OWC) have come up with a new solution to help us work faster and smarter and as luck would have it I have their new OWC Accelsior 4M2 NVMe PCIe card installed in my PC to try it out.
NVMe Storage
NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory Express and is a form of storage interface introduced in 2013. The Non-Volatile bit means the storage isn’t erased when your computer is turned off. The Express part refers to the fact that the data travels over the PCI Express (PCIe) interface on your computer’s motherboard. This gives the drive a far more direct connection with your CPU since data doesn’t have to hop on and off a Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) controller.
The OWC Accelsior 4M2 NVMe PCIe Storage Solution
OWC says that the Accelsior 4M2 NVMe SSD is fastest SSD they have ever built with over 6,000MB/s data transfer speed for large format video editing, VR/AR/MR environments, extreme gaming, and other high bandwidth needs. The card is available in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and 8TB configurations starting at $530 all the way up to $2000. Accelsior 4M2 will run perfectly in your Mac Pro 2019, Mac Pro 2012 and 2010, and PC towers.
I have the 2TB card installed in my HP Z840 workstation.
The Accelsior 4M2 features silent cooling via a finned heat sink cover. It should be installed in an x8 or x16 slot in your PC or Mac to take full advantage of its read and write capabilities. If your Mac or PC doesn’t have an available or compatible PCIe slot but is Thunderbolt 3-equipped, the Accelsior 4M2 can be used externally in one of the OWC Mercury Helios 3s cases.
Accelsior 4M2 was designed with a PCIe switch to let your computer address each of the M.2 NVMe drives at full x4 PCIe speeds instead of hard-limiting each drive to x2 PCIe speeds. When running in JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives mode) where all four drives are typically not accessed at the same time, each drive has the unlocked capability to run at full speed.
It is worth noting that the 6,000 MB per second claim is when the 4 internal NVMe sticks are in a Raided configuration. OWC includes their SoftRaid application in the package but this is for macOS only and not PC compatible. However, for my purposes I do not require the sticks to be raided into single 2TB drive, I want to see the sticks as 4 separate drives on my system.
Installation
As you can see my HP Z840 is getting very nicely populated. I actually had to pull out one of my UAD-2 Octo cards to install the Accelsior 4M2 card between the Avid HDX card and my GEFORCE RTX2080 GPU. At this time I’m not worried about the heat as the HP Z840 has a cooling system designed by BMW. It never gets on in there.
Plenty Of Drives
At any one time, I might have up to 16 storage devices attached to my PC. Yes, that is a lot of drives. But recording and editing 4K video really does eat up your drive space. I also have a lot of sample libraries. Most of these are currently on old-style very large rotational (spinning rust) drives. Loading my orchestral scoring template can take well over 6 minutes with all the samples from EastWest, Vienna and Native Instruments. Not what you might call an efficient use of time.
After installing the Accelsior 4M2 I used the AJA Speed Test app on one of the 446GB partitions to find out the data transfer rates.
I then decided to try the same test of the 6TB rotation drive that my samples are stored and on a 500GB that I have been using as a scratch or working drive. The numbers really do speak for themselves.
In for a penny as they say. I also tested the 1TB NVMe that I have set up as a system drive and an external 1TB SSD connected over USB2.
Results
Storage is not the most exciting subject ever presented on Production Expert, however, take it from me that there is nothing more frustrating than waiting for samples or a large session to load. Even more annoying is when the speed of your drives, not just their size affects the smooth running of your session, be that audio or video. Yes, Pro Tools does have disk cache feature but if you are driving your system hard, it could be that the RAM in your system is better served running your plug-ins and applications rather than being temporary drive space.
Installing the OWC Accelsior 4M2 PCIe card into my system has given me two things. It has given me a faster working disk that is twice as fast as my current solution. Video playback within Pro Tools and my video NLE is much improved and I am now able to have over 15 channels of 4K video running at the same time from the same drive.
It has also allowed me to move nearly all my instrumental samples and libraries onto a drive format that is over 10 times faster than my current system. My orchestral template now loads in just under 60 seconds. And there I was, about to go and make another cup of tea.
You can find out more about the Accelsior 4M2 PCIe NVMe storage options at the Other World Computing website.