Rémi,

In most cases, directly connected SSD drives to your onboard SATA controller will give you better results than a NAS. There are a few exceptions. 

I've done some tests with NAS configurations, with varying levels of success, and I feel like it takes alot of effort to make it work right. You have to optimize the network so you don't introduce additional layers of latency through Ethernet. 1 Gbps NIC's could actually be a bottleneck depending on your drive/controller speeds. You also have to make sure that the NAS is robust and has good onboard SATA controllers, which you will probably get only if you buy something high-end or really have some skill building server-grade components.

Beware of cheap NAS devices. Most of it is junk. The disk controllers on the MacPro will almost always smoke external devices unless you really put effort into sourcing the right hardware. 

Regards,
Jason Todd Shannon

Many Thanks Jason!

"directly connected SSD drives to your onboard SATA controller will give you better results"

Hi ChoPraTS,

There are so many variables involved, it is difficult to say which is the best configuration. When it comes to RAID, the quality of the controller plays a large role in performance. You will also want to consider the fact that test/benchmark results will almost always show much better performance than you will actually see in real-world practice. With that said, I think you need to test for yourself on your own system. I wouldn't look at forum comments as universally credible/applicable across all users. Everyone has different hardware, software and use cases. I suspect that most forum users "not recommending RAID" have to do with the difficulty of configuration and the risk of data corruption, particularly with RAID0. 

I recently upgraded from multiple SATA III drives to multiple NVMe drives. I tried both a RAID0 and a non-RAID configuration. In my particular case I did not see a real-world performance difference, so I settled on an independent, non-RAID configuration. I found the non-RAID NVMe configuration to be a huge performance upgrade compared to my RAID0 SATAIII configuration.

Lastly, if you are going to experiment with RAID, I can't recommend enough that you find a good controller. Intel RAID controllers are generally pretty solid. I've personally experienced too much failure from software RAID and cheap controllers to trust anything but a great controller (Intel, High Point, etc.). 

Please share what you learn. 

Regards,
Jason Todd Shannon

I have been using two Highpoint 7101-a1 devices plugged into two PCIe-x16 slots on my X299 motherboard. Each of the Highpoints contain four NVME 1 TB SSDs, and all eight SSDs are configured into a single 8TB RAID 0 array.

I use this for all my audio files. I can't easily provide ocmparisons with other systems, but I can say that the performance is transparently fast, and the Highpoint drivers and controllers seem to be flawless.

Not affiliated with Highpoint in any way.

Hi JL. Can you elaborate more on what you mean by a "chunky sound"? Are you hearing dropouts from the samples? Are you seeing any errors from the disk performance monitor? I'd also suggest monitoring all of your CPU cores to make sure that the software RAID isn't having an adverse effect on processing. 

Hi Jason,

Thanks for your quick response.

Yes, dropouts in sample playback seems to be the right word. It's like samples struggling to load from that disk, which is supposedly my fastest drive. I see spikes in the CPU monitor in Synchron Player each time I play a new note. It's like if my buffer what set too low, or a little similar to what happens when an unloaded cell is loaded upon midi triggering. I tried to push up the buffer a little, changes nothing.

I'm wondering why I have a good bandwidth and poor performance. This problem even occurs on smaller Synched libraries on my NVME, but doesn't not exist when streaming form my "normal" SSD.

After a while, playback gets "normal". It's like loading samples one at a time, every time I play a new note, and apparently, even the same note with different velocities can make a CPU spike.

Thanks for your help :-)

JL,

If you are using an external enclosure, do you have a way of monitoring temps to make sure that they aren't getting too hot? Have you disabled power saving on those drives? I'd also double check all of the Thunderbolt devices, cables and drivers as these have given me all kinds of trouble both in WIN/MAC, but particularly on Hackintosh.