I would like to understand if the internals, PCIE3 matter… or if I need to make sure its SATA inside.
I have read that external SSDs tend to have much faster random write (this is actually to save time refreshing my music from my laptop to the drive, so benefits of USB 3.2).
When plugged into the Denon SC Live 4, I only care that I can read / write to the single drive (if needs be, I can still buy two and read from one, record session on other).
But really, even if the standalone controller only had usb 2.0, there should still be theoretically enough capacity.
Oh yeah, and the bonus I see in this device, if in case of emergency, I could maybe store a backup set of music on my phone, and plug this drive directly into the phone and sync across. But before I even get there, I plan to clone two of these and have the second one handy in case the first fails.
Forget anything from transcend , well, that’s my opinion on them anyway. In their spinning drives, they used to simply keep their own external casings then throw whatever third party brand of OEM hard drive component into that case, as was cheapest for them at the time… so you could buy two of their drives, identical it seemed, but get different performances from each as one might have had a Fujitsu drive within, compared to a Samsung drive in the other.
I guess if we are saying 3D NAND technology is compatible, then I don’t have anything to worry about. If so, the USB 3.2 will be the bottleneck on my laptop, and USB 2.0/3.0 (not sure which the SC LIVE 4 has) will be the bottleneck there, both acceptable.
The best thing about Engine DJ databse is they didnt make it multiple small chunks of files like Rekordbox which i have learnt make rkbx transfers painfully slow. So for your transfer/performance disk just make sure it has good write speeds and you will save time.
I am a bit wary about building an NVME based drive though - power, thermals etc.
Have you considered something like the Samsung T7 or T9?
I am happy to go with a prebuilt usb ssd rather than a roll my own. The only reason was because I got it in my head it needed to be SATA (via M.2. for example)
Think it was because I read an old version of the SC Live 4 manual, which stated SATA under the USB section, but was probably a copy paste error from the Prime 4, describing the hard drive bay.
Think I will try a local South African company out, it gets good reviews and is competive in price. Not quite at the modern usb 3.2 speeds possible, but it is definitely around the 3.0 mark.
Doesn’t have all the bells and whistles like DRAM cache, but good enough for the standalone (bottleneck is the USB interface) and it doesn’t take too long to export my library.
Price point was decent. Will check out the link for next time.
