Help choosing extra sample storage.

My hard drive is running out of real estate due to my over dependence on samples. I'm on a Powerbook, so a new or second internal harddrive is out of the question. I'm thinking about purchasing an external harddrive, USB powered. My question is this: will I be able to stream about 256 MB worth of audio data from the external USB harddrive into Kontakt/Cubase? If not, or if it cannot do it comfortably, I'm also thinking about just dumping all of my samples onto the external harddrive and then moving them over to my Powerbook's internal harddrive whenever I make a new patch in Kontakt. Oh, the joys of using a laptop :->

 

Though I haven't tried it myself, I don't think that USB 2.0 will be able to stream fast enough for serious sample streaming usage.

Firewire800 should be able to do it, but not USB 2.0 or Firewire400. It may work for a while, but only in limited amounts.

(I haven't tried this myself so am certainly open to correction; however, this is my guess based on the specs.)

 

...

HI

No USB drive !

You can change your internal hard drive to bigger one 7200 rpm with 8MB
cach
The Fire wire drive is another solution, a better solution is a RAID 0
of 2 or 3 FW drive

Another solution is to use the FW disk as your system disk, to put the
samples and the swap file on the internal disk ( you must test the
speed of your disks, use Xbench to do it

The PB is not made for heavy studio recording ! use a 2x2.5 G5 for big
orchestra !

If you had been using Logic and the EXS24 that would have been
different !

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xtra sample storage

I saw a nifty little item in an ad magazine [possibly only for Macs] from a company, EZQuest - an external drive esp. for audio - I'm fixin' to install a 10k rpm SCSI to stream samples to my PC ..

 

Careful -- if it's EZQuest it's probably an external drive, and if it's external, it's probably not fast enough to stream samples fast enough.

"Optimized for audio" drives are usually not any different than other drives; it's just marketing spin. You can put audio on any external drives and it'll work -- the difference is the QUANTITY of audio it can handle, and an "optimized for audio" drive may not offer any more quantity than a regular external drive.

 

yes, it's an external drive - available sizes are large, Firewire 800 would seem to be fast enough throughput; haven't seen any other specs. other than the 8MB buffer, which many external drifves don't feature... and "the Oxford 811 and 912 chipset". comes with a MAc defragger and it's own power supply - might be a serious item. most external FW and USB drives I'd not even consider for streaming, of course if it's as expensive as EG: one of the faster spinning (10 or 15k) SCSIs, well, no..
>this is the 'difference', tho':
"Qualified for DigiDesign ProTools" - {PT has always been picky per HDs}
c.

 

Be careful -- "certified for Pro Tools" doesn't necessarily mean it'll work well for streaming samplers. Streaming samplers require faster disk access speeds than regular audio work (e.g. Pro Tools or any other DAW).

Firewire400 enclosures that are four years old are sufficient for Pro Tools and can usually bring you at least 32 simultaneous audio tracks, sometimes a lot more, depending on their design.

But they work horribly for streaming samples.

Firewire800, in theory, should be fast enough, but I haven't tested it myself, nor do I know anyone who has. So I would be hesitant to recommend such a setup. It may not work as well as it needs to.

 

Maxtor 250gig 1-touch 7200 USB2

I'm presently using this for streaming samples in Kompakt on my 2nd PC.

So far it has not had to work too hard and has performed well.

From experience, disk management is more important regarding a disk being able to cope with disk streaming traffic, especially with larger disks.
At some point they become too fragmented, and no amount of performing defrag operations will render the disk useable.
This shouldn't be too much of an issue with sample play-back libraries. If you should make, convert and optimise existing libraries for Kontakt, the samples tend to get spread around the disk.
At this point drop out's and or the number of samples able to be streamed at the sametime is significantly reduced.

In an ideal world it would be better to reformat the disk and copy over the completed libraries to make better use of contigunous files.
Either that or find some intelligent defrag software, which to date I haven't yet found.

 

well yes 800 m.bits should be enough throughput, but noone knows.. I'm considering a drive for my G5. I've a 37GB 10000RPM SCSI to install for my PC - {w a controller and all, rather expensive and complex.} thanx, for all info..

 

USB 2.0 is certainly up to snuff and comparable to Firewire for most work. I use an ADS external housing with a 7200 Seagate baracuda 160 GB drive with 8MB buffer - worrks well with Kontakt in DFD mode running GPO. Just make sure your ports are working properly.

 

Also Noto Bene: a little Windows quirk RE: USB
In Device Manager/Property page for USB Root Hub, this is checked by default: "allow computer to turn this device off to save power"; which will wreak obviously havoc with whatever device - I used to read about all manner of MIDI dropouts etc. when MIDI is via USB, perhaps all attributable to this. Pretty basic but easy enough to miss. Also depending on hardware cfg, may be helpful {in Dev Mngr} setting Comm. Ports to highest bps, flow control to 'Hardware' etc.