New Korg Kronos X with OS 2.0

[MartinHines]

I have to choose between:

1. Voiding the 2 years left on my warranty and install a $120 128 GB SSD drive myself

or

2. Spend upwards of $500 to have Korg install a 62 GB SSD and retain my 2 year warranty

I am not totally convinced that installing the drive yourself will void your warranty. I believe the correct answer is it MAY void your warranty.

If you have something go wrong with your Kronos you would take it to a Korg authorized repair shop. The repair shop would take a copy of your original sales invoice, purchase parts and perform the repair and file a warranty claim with the Korg Country distributor (or the repair shop would get Korg to authorize the repair before any work was done).

From my perspective, the only way Korg could deny your warranty claim would be if the problem COULD have been caused by you installing the hard drive yourself. For example if the touchscreen died (part failure) I am not sure how Korg could blame this on user installation of a new hard drive. The same would be true if some problem with the keyboard action was discovered.

One action you could consider is to upgrade the factory drive to OS2.0, then replace it with a new drive. If you ever had any problem requiring warranty service you could put the old drive back in.

[jahrome]

Most of the local dealers here in Japan have the Kronos X in stock. I wish there was a way I take my USB thumb drive and download 2.0 onto it from a Kronos X.

[John Hendry]

If you read the early posts on the Kronos you will see Korg used a higher quality SSD than the usual computer grade SSD drives. I would assume Korg is still using a better SSD drive that should be considered when referencing upgrading to a larger SSD drive. Also memory comes in varying quality and although a gig is no longer considered a lot of memory the quality can make a noticeable difference so citing the cheapest made is a bad comparison. I can remember when the quality of memory (and bios/mem setup) made the difference of a flight sim running smoothly or not. Poorer quality memory could not be set up as well for performance.

Has anyone noted the brand/quality of SSD drive and memory Korg uses?

I would suspect (and hope keeping up with improvements time provides) the motherboard used has some minor improvements made to it as well, and not just in the BIOS. This is nothing to get people upset about as a year is a long time in the computer world and motherboards improve with time, but then again I am talking about MS software/hardware compatibility issues with many brands of video cards etc, not a custom Linux system than has set unchanging hardware.

No one would kick an OASYS out of their studio but its age based on its PC computer based heart (parts availability) is something to concider and why I waited (forever) to get an OASYS thinking it's warm running older CPU/MB would be updated which never happened to my surprise. Personally I hope and think Korg will come out with a cpu intensive monster (read OASYS PCI literature on why custom DSPs were needed) focusing more on modeling....unless the patents related to the technology is a hindrance to doing so. I think the weak link of the Kronos (and other brands) is "real" sounding and behaving instruments that advanced physical modeling can emulate and this is where sound synthesis will head to keep advancing. So its no fair complaining about hardware costs saying "I can get that at Comp City for cheaper" as R&D is where the expense to build a great synth is found and Korg has an obvious need to get their R&D costs back through making a profit on the hardware they sell us.

I can take my Kronos back Monday and get the X....thinking about it to avoid the hassle and added expence later with upgrading to Korg's spec with the X and OS 2. It's kinda cool to get the best synth made home and find out it just got upgraded and you can return it for the "new" model with an X on it. The hardware is not a new model.....but the new OS may qualify it as one so all Kronos owners should be really happy about Korg's lastest move to the "X" serries.

John^^

[michelkeijzers]

If you read the early posts on the Kronos you will see Korg used a higher quality SSD than the usual computer grade SSD drives. I would assume Korg is still using a better SSD drive that should be considered when referencing upgrading to a larger SSD drive. Also memory comes in varying quality and although a gig is no longer considered a lot of memory the quality can make a noticeable difference so citing the cheapest made is a bad comparison. I can remember when the quality of memory (and bios/mem setup) made the difference of a flight sim running smoothly or not. Poorer quality memory could not be set up as well for performance.

Has anyone noted the brand/quality of SSD drive and memory Korg uses?
John^^

I don't know the brand, however it might be true a very good SSD is used. Writing is not really an issue, but when playing an SGX-1 piano or HD1, samples are continuously read from the SSD so I guess the heat and/or MTBF values should be good.

Writing limits are probably less of an issue.

About improvements of the motherboard: there is no mention of it, but probably such details will not be mentioned anywy.

[MRedZac]

If you read the early posts on the Kronos you will see Korg used a higher quality SSD than the usual computer grade SSD drives. I would assume Korg is still using a better SSD drive that should be considered when referencing upgrading to a larger SSD drive. Also memory comes in varying quality and although a gig is no longer considered a lot of memory the quality can make a noticeable difference so citing the cheapest made is a bad comparison. I can remember when the quality of memory (and bios/mem setup) made the difference of a flight sim running smoothly or not. Poorer quality memory could not be set up as well for performance.

Has anyone noted the brand/quality of SSD drive and memory Korg uses?
John^^

I don't know the brand, however it might be true a very good SSD is used. Writing is not really an issue, but when playing an SGX-1 piano or HD1, samples are continuously read from the SSD so I guess the heat and/or MTBF values should be good.

Writing limits are probably less of an issue.

About improvements of the motherboard: there is no mention of it, but probably such details will not be mentioned anywy.

Well, good or bad is the question, in the old Kronos they used a Toshiba 30 GB drive (Toshiba THNSNB030GBSJ), the nowadays price is around 90 Euro for this. I believe, they will use for Kronos X the same drive, just the other version with 62 GB, which is out on the market, too (Toshiba THNSNB062GBSJ)... Anyway, both drives with 180MB/s reading and 50MB/s writing speed are not the fastest drives...

[BobTheDog]

You don't really need a high read speed anyway, a 48K stereo 24bit audio stream is less than 300KB/Sec.

If you do the maths you will see that the current disk is over specified for what the Kronos needs for live streaming of samples.

Also I am not sure if putting a faster disk in would speed up the boot, the maths again would indicated that the Kronos should be able to fill its 2GB ram from this disk in less than 12 seconds, so there are obviously a lot of other factors in the boot time that are not directly related to disk io speed.

[MRedZac]

Concerning the read speed, that might be true, but the write speed is really slow and could be much faster... Especially if it comes up to self-created sample databases...

[BobTheDog]

50 MB/sec slow!

What do you think needs writing to the disk quicker than this?

[MRedZac]

50 MB/sec slow!

What do you think needs writing to the disk quicker than this?

Well, the drive, I put into my Kronos has 190 MB/s write speed - a huge difference in speed which you really feel while saving some data, my friend...
It is not a question of what Kronos NEEDS, it's a question of how to speed up working with the Kronos in general...

[BobTheDog]

Sorry I may be being a bit thick but what data are you saving?

[michelkeijzers]

Sorry I may be being a bit thick but what data are you saving?

Sample data probably.

Sequencer data is not much but for user created sampling data it might be a difference.

[BobTheDog]

How much sample data though, a hours worth of stereo sampling would take about 20 secs to save and I wonder how many users would do that?

The stock disk can write as quick as USB2 which is probably why the engineers went for that speed when they specified it, they probably thought that if a user had sampled an hours worth of realtime audio then a 20 second wait would not be that bad to save it.

[LivePsy]

Come on guys! Speed of the SSD would only be relevant for streaming samples and hard disk recording. Things which must happen in real time. No engineer is going to stress over start times which might only happen once a day, or the user saving samples a few times a day.

This talk of good or bad drives is rubbish. Just another defence for expensive installs at authorized service centers. Shameful to use fear to force users to pay for what is just profit for the service center.

B

[Sharp]

Come on guys! Speed of the SSD would only be relevant for streaming samples and hard disk recording.

I don't think it's relevant in this situation at all. Installing a faster drive will give you no benefit in streaming or loading times because the SATA Controller is maxing out.

I timed the factory drive against an OCZ Agility 3 which hugely out specs the factory drive, even when the OCZ SATA3 drive is running in SATA2 mode, which is what the KRONOS runs at. The loading times where identical which leads me to think the SATA controller on the motherboard is maxing out.

I haven't timed the OCZ saving, but I would expect it to beat the socks of the factory drive here as I doubt the factory drive is anywhere even close to maxing out the controller when saving, where the OCZ drive would easily do that.

I mustt time themboth on saving to see.

Regards
Sharp.

[LivePsy]

Yes Sharp, you're agreeing with my phrase "Speed of the SSD would only be relevant". The point being that speed is NOT relevant other than real time steaming.

Streaming only has be fast enought to keep up, which SATA 2 spec does already. So the only problems with any SATA 2 or 3 drive would be compatibility with the Kronos hardware, or if the drive cannot sustain enough throughput even if the spec sheet says it does.

I'm going to go with your recommendation on a SSD, Sharp, after OS 2 has settled down and I feel brave enough to upgrade the RAM and SSD.

Cheers,
B