Any theories about why Cubase is using less than 10% of the available drive bandwidth during (slow) project loads?
I have all my samples and project audio on an m.2 NVMe drive which reads at around 2300MB/s.
And yet, when loading projects with a lot of big sample libraries it loads slowly - see screenshot showing Cubase only using 104.2 MB/s of drive bandwidth during load.
So, what’s Cubase doing and why can’t it use more of the available drive bandwidth for a faster load?
Any theories?
If you have a standalone version of the VSTi (like Kontakt) you could compare how it loads the same library vs within Cubase.
Reviving this thread, I experience the same thing, and my OS and libraries are m.2 NVM3 drives. It doesn’t make any sense how slow projects load. Sometimes it takes 4-5 minutes to load a project that uses about 10gb of ram
I would have thought that sample libraries would be loaded by their respective players - Kontakt, HALion, et al. Surely Cubase just loads the player, not the libraries.
Also, the number of effects plugins affects a project’s loading time - the more, the longer.
Also, you can improve Kontakt load times by setting it to remove the unused samples once the Track’s MIDI is finalized.
I recall seeing in the recent past, complains about Kontakt loading times (not just in Cubase, it was a general issue), which seemed to be fixed by its latest updates.
I’m in the latest version. If I open Kontakt by itself, the libraries open up quickly. It’s when I open up Cubase that it crawls to a halt.
I don’t use Kontakt (or any other sample players for that matter), and virtually all of my tracks are frozen, so there aren’t any plugins to load.
It still takes what seems like an eternity to load (and close) my projects, so yeah, I’m curious too as to what’s happening (and whether there are ways to accelerate this).
It makes me have to be strategic when to open and close projects, and that’s no way to live 
My experience. YMMV, of course.
Windows 10, i9 12900, AMD GPU, libraries on an M2 drive, OS on an SSD.
4 minute project, all sample libraries:
3 Kontakts, one with one patch (Shreddage bass), one with 4 (MOJO brass) and one with 6 (The Ladies);
GrooveAgent, 1 kit;
3 Arturia organs;
6 Musiclab guitars;
Whole bunch of processors on tracks and on the 11 groups.
27 gigs of RAM, CPU 40%;
16:32:00 started Cubase (13.0.41)
16:32:25 started loading project;
16:33:55 Project window appears.
Cubase took 25 seconds;
The project took 1 minute 30 seconds;
1 minute 55 seconds.
Using the Windows clock, not a stopwatch.
Ironically, Cubase went doo-lally while I was doing this - one of the Kontakts’ started to flash, and I eventually had to use the Task Manager to kill Cubase. Hey ho.
Hi,
Do you use Windows 10/11 ?
See this Steinberg article and also exclude in Windows Security settings all folders containing *.vstsound files and the folder(s) containing all Cubase projects.
Thanks, I tried this, including a ton of folders, but nothing has changed. A simple project takes about 3-4 minutes to open on my Windows, but on the Macbook Pro it opens up much quicker.