Had a 2TB Seagate Plus Slim (with 1.2TB of music on it, 45,000+ songs) giving me a bit an issue dropping connection on my SC5000. So I decide to give an external NVME a shot, picked up a Kingston KC3000 PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD along with a Vantec M.2 NVMe SSD To USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 Type C Enclosure .
Did a exFat format on the NVME and transferred the entire contents from the old drive, the new NVME is blazing fast in Engine desktop and even the analyzing of the music is insanely fast. Plugged it into the SC5000 and it didn’t read, though it might be a cable issue and swapped it out and still nothing. Thinking that the USB port on the SC5000 might not have enough power to drive the enclosure I grabbed a spare active Vantec 7-Port USB 3.0 hub and plugged that into the SC5000 and used it to extend the USB port.
It works, ridiculously fast, the drive shows up instantly and navigating through all the music and folders is fluid. Pre Listening and hopping from track to track is beyond fast with zero issues or lag. I even added 3 other USB sticks with no Engine analyzing and allowed the SC5000 analyze the music in real time and it was incredibly fast, way faster if I had just plugged in a USB stick alone.
So I just wanted to say thanks to Denon for having forethought of being able to use a USB 3.0 hub with their hardware and giving us the ability to expand our gear, and if anyone with a large collection of music is having any slow downs you might consider the method I did.
EDIT: Just analyzed 2831 tracks for the first time in 44:01:00 min. Ran Database Optimization & Database Back-Up on my collection of 47,136 songs in 00:34:12 seconds. So yea NVME is the way to go, for me at least.
PC Spec: Processor Intel(R) Core™ i5-8265U CPU @ 1.60GHz 1.80 GHz, Installed RAM 8.00 GB