Hard Drive Not Fast Enough??

I have a project I'm working with in Logic Pro and I am doing piano, bass, and drums all through Kontakt. In once instance of Kontakt, I have a piano, bass, and four instances of Abbey Road 60s Drummer opened. I do this because I like to be able to play each drum part (kick, snare, toms, and cymbals) all on their separate tracks for ease of mixing. This does not negatively impact CPU usage or hog unnecessary amounts of memory because there is only one instance of Kontakt opened.

However, I'm noticing some cracks, pops, and stuttering in the audio when I play the track back and after closer inspection the disk usage indicator is lighting up red. All of my Kontakt instruments are installed on an external hard drive. I do not have enough space on my laptop's internal drive. So I have a few questions.

1) Is USB-C simply not able to transfer the data fast enough to keep up?
2) Would I benefit from using a solid state external drive instead?
3) Should I/could I install the Abbey Road 60s Drummer library on my internal drive?

 

External ssd drive should be fine. Use a disk speed test tool to test current hdd speed. Basic ssd speed will be about ...oops

correction..
500mb/sec for SSD DRIVE
3200mb/sec for M2/NVME

 

USB C is a physical plug format not a data transfer format (which is USB # - where # is a number or number followed by a phrase eg USB 3 ver 2 or USB 2.1). So to answer your question we need to know what your external drive’s read speed is. Also is that external drive being accessed for anything else at playback time (eg does it have the Logic project itself saved to it)?
Also what size buffer are you using for playback? Increasing it may ‘solve’ your issue.

 

MB/s.

 

Ha. Yeah. Mb/sec. typing on ipad and middle age.

 

1) as already explained it depends on the speed of the connected device for USB this can 480 Mb up to 20 Gb (it also depends on the controller)
2) Yes ... as SSDs can read from everywhere on the drive while HDD's are more like a record player you need to get the needle on the right spot at the right time to get what you are looking for and if you need multiple things at once it would slow things down even more
3) I am not sure if you are able to have 2 locations for the library to exist So I cant answer that but if possible it could potentially help

as for the whole part about SSD's that Simchris wrote ...
500 MB/sec would be for an internal Sata SSD A USB 3 version of this would be a bit slower since they usually use USB 3.2 Gen 1 for these type of drives that can handle up to 5 Gb of data while Sata can go up to 6 Gb
3200 MB/sec would be for older Internal M2/NVMe Drives (I currently have newer M2/NVMe drives that go to an insane 7000 MB/sec)
however if you have an external SSD that is based on NVMe they are most likely going to be USB 3.2 Gen 2 with 10 Gb (~1000 MB/sec)
and in a rare case you might be able to get a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 that can handle 20Gb (~2000 MB/sec)

A common one I can Recommend is the Samsung T7 as this is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 and comes in various capacities up to 2 TB and it is not that insanely expansive

 

Do note that those speeds you're quoting are all sequential read speeds, that have no bearing when using direct from disk streaming in a sampler. For this, random read 4K block read speed is the one that matters (and with queue depth of 1 in case of Kontakt).

 

Really appreciate all the valuable insight here everyone. Thank you!