SD card parameters and formatting

There was a guy on a different forum who said he'd formatted sandisk extreme pro SD card as EXT4. Committed to writing after doing objective tests but seems to have a dropped the ball.

Has anyone managed to do that as well? To what effect?

I've checked my card, it is Toshiba micro SD HC speed 10. Will it perform much better if formatted to EXT4?

To be kind of weird if I didn't know I didn't propagate this if it really worked.

Sorry, I dictated the previous post. The last sentence was meant to be it would be kind of weird if akai knew about advantages of this formatting and didn't propagate.

One more question, does the speed of the SD device in force justify high speed SD cards such as extreme pro models with speeds up to 200 megabytes per second?

Has anyone tested the performance of the device itself?

I haven't tested it, but I think I read somewhere that the SD card reader is connected to the CPU via a relatively slow internal USB bus, which strangles data throughput so much that it doesn't matter what you use. The internal SSD SATA connector suffers from the same.

There's also something wrong with how the Force's own software handles opening files. If your project or keygroup program or drum program uses a lot of separate files, it will take many times longer to load than on an MPC. But if you combine all the WAV files into one big "chain" sample file, so that all samples share the same file, it will speed up loading by an order of magnitude. So it's not so much about how much DATA or disk block accesses there are, it's how many FILES it uses. Sounds incredibly dumb but that's the way it is with the Force. The MPC will also benefit from sample chaining, but not as much as the Force.

My own experience with sample chaining

A certain Rhodes sample set I converted from Kontakt and reduced to Akai limits in Ableton, 165 megabytes, 418 wavs, takes over 60 seconds to load on my Force 3.2.3. But when all the samples are chained in one WAV, it loads in 4 seconds

So it looks like, in theory it could read at least 40 megabytes per second from the SSD (at least) , but it needs over 130 milliseconds per file. What the actual fsck can it possibly do for 0.13 seconds, for a single file??? That would mean an incredible processing rate of eight files per second. I'm sure this would also get Roger Linn's approval, well programmed, boys, good job.

All in all, I'd say, it is what it is, and there's nothing you can do to make it any significantly better. The biggest slowdown is the software, which you can't change.

If you want to test different file systems, it should be fairly trivial and straight-forward to do. Buy several identical memory cards, format them to different file systems, copy all the same files to each card, and measure the loading times.

That's a complete clarity, thanks. Just wanted to check, because a hyperextreme sd can cost as little as 20 bucks. Seems fast enough for my purposes, even without SSD, so I won't be upgrading SD in hope for more.

WarriorLite wrote:That's a complete clarity, thanks. Just wanted to check, because a hyperextreme sd can cost as little as 20 bucks. Seems fast enough for my purposes, even without SSD, so I won't be upgrading SD in hope for more.

IMO, the SD is there more as a convenience of not having to connect the Force to a PC just to back up the SSD. Just alway make & save the same thing on both cards. You can use those 5 folder Shortcut icon in the Loading menu to speed thing up.

Not quite sure what you mean by saving all on both cards. Is it what needs doing or what is avoided by having the SSD?

Or, to put it differently, what is your process for handling daily saves, library sample imports, backups?

HouseWithoutMouse wrote:I haven't tested it, but I think I read somewhere that the SD card reader is connected to the CPU via a relatively slow internal USB bus, which strangles data throughput so much that it doesn't matter what you use. The internal SSD SATA connector suffers from the same.

There's also something wrong with how the Force's own software handles opening files. If your project or keygroup program or drum program uses a lot of separate files, it will take many times longer to load than on an MPC. But if you combine all the WAV files into one big "chain" sample file, so that all samples share the same file, it will speed up loading by an order of magnitude. So it's not so much about how much DATA or disk block accesses there are, it's how many FILES it uses. Sounds incredibly dumb but that's the way it is with the Force. The MPC will also benefit from sample chaining, but not as much as the Force.

My own experience with sample chaining

A certain Rhodes sample set I converted from Kontakt and reduced to Akai limits in Ableton, 165 megabytes, 418 wavs, takes over 60 seconds to load on my Force 3.2.3. But when all the samples are chained in one WAV, it loads in 4 seconds

So it looks like, in theory it could read at least 40 megabytes per second from the SSD (at least) , but it needs over 130 milliseconds per file. What the actual fsck can it possibly do for 0.13 seconds, for a single file??? That would mean an incredible processing rate of eight files per second. I'm sure this would also get Roger Linn's approval, well programmed, boys, good job.

All in all, I'd say, it is what it is, and there's nothing you can do to make it any significantly better. The biggest slowdown is the software, which you can't change.

If you want to test different file systems, it should be fairly trivial and straight-forward to do. Buy several identical memory cards, format them to different file systems, copy all the same files to each card, and measure the loading times.

So far, I have been able to get up to 20% cpu and less than that RAM, in part because I am testing staying within the 8 tracks and accept other limitaitons of AF. So unless Akai start selling massive synths, performance might not be a concern, although I have already seen this machine restart many times.

I wonder if this might have to do with the added burden of autosave.

Akai is already selling massive synths, just don't buy them.

Staying within the machine's limitations is the only way to go. Basically, anything that doesn't feel very easy and light, is stretching the limitations.

Random crashes are random. I don't use auto save, I use shift+save.

WarriorLite wrote:Not quite sure what you mean by saving all on both cards. Is it what needs doing or what is avoided by having the SSD?

Or, to put it differently, what is your process for handling daily saves, library sample imports, backups?

Whatever I save on the SSD, I make the same folders/files on the SD/USB as well to have a back up. Then I can take the SD/USB to my PC & back up there & wherever else.

The 5 folder Shortcut icons in the load menu helps to speed this up. Folder#1 I use for SSD & #2 for the SD. I set them to the current project I'm working. The only thing is sometimes you don't know where you saving to when you press Shift-Save I don't use auto-save & I recommend you get in the habit of using S&S.

I usually wait awhile before I back up to the PC, but mainly because my USB jack got broken in the back of the Force. The little blue plastic piece with the 4 metal prongs. I kinda fixed it by pulling the metal prongs back, but I don't trust how secure it is, so try not to use PC mode.

Plus going into PC mode ends the project. Ejecting the SD/USB doesn't. You can take it out, do what you need to do & pop it back in while the keeping the project open.

This saves me from having to go into computer mode & connect my PC to move files around. Just make sure to keep both file structures & files names the same on all drives.

I can go into more detail of how I structure my files to keep stuff organized if you like, but that topic should have it's own thread.

Ejecting the SD/USB doesn't [get force out of the project you're working on]. You can take it out, do what you need to do & pop it back in while the keeping the project open.

That's the ultimate arguement and the power tip thanks.

What kind of operations might you need to do on your PC without leaving the project on force?

File structure would be much appreciated, I'll start a thread. I most recent discovery has been that you can sort by date modified. In most cases I would seek to minimise the effort related to naming, ideally that would be done entirely by force. Having made a snare for a project, I don't anticipate to ever reuse it. Next time I will roll my own again. This applies to practically everything except project names.

Many thanks. That's insiders knowledge.