How to make do with only two drives

Hi folks,

I only have two hard drives: my internal and an external Glyph firewire (pretty fast). Is it best (for DFD reasons, obviously) to have the Kontakt library on the internal (system) drive, or on the external? Currently, I have my samples on the internal drive and record to the external, but lately I'm running into CPU overload, so I wondered if there was a better solution.

Related question: are USB 2.0 drives fast enough for DFD?

One more: if it turns out I should move my sample library to the external drive, is it just a matter of copying it, or do I need to re-install so that Kontakt can find it OK (that would be a headache, but...)?

Thanks!
Bob

 

Hi there,

I use four drives -- one for system and software, one for DFD samples, one for recording, and one for video streaming. I think you'd be better off with a second firewire drive (making three) even if you have to add a firewire card. I hope this will work for you -- I used to stream samples in via Firewire 400 on a Giga setup, record out via Firewire (I think it was 800 actually, but 400 is still pretty fast if you are not trying to do too many tracks at a time) and it worked just fine.

And you don't have to reinstall all the samples, just copy them to the separate drive. Then, to get Kontakt or whatever you are using to find them, you can delete them off the original drive. When it can't find them it will ask and you can point the software to the new location on the new drive.

If your experience is like most, keeping these separate drives makes a big difference in performance.

 

I agree with John. Also, from what I understand, USB 2.0 is not, overall, as fast as firewire 400, so I would avoid that and stick with firewire or better yet, a second internal drive.

 

Unfortunately, the Intel iMac can't accommodate a second internal drive. And I'm not in a position right now to add another fw drive. But thank you for the suggestions!

 

Kontakt needs the samples drive to have the lowest (fastest) seek times possible.

Internal drives are always the best in this regard. If you can put your samples on an internal, that's best.

Firewire is better than USB.

10krpm drives usually give better results than 7200, which give better results than 5400.

Since you're on an iMac, your choices are very limited. I would put the samples on your internal drive if at all possible. If that's not possible, and if you've ruled out buying a Firewire drive, yes you could try with an external USB2 drive, and it might work for low to moderate loads, but my hunch is that you'll max it out pretty quickly and start to hear glitching.

 

Putting a bigger internal HD into your imac might be a good solution.
the best of luck
b

 

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.

The Kontakt library is currently on the iMac's internal drive, so I'll leave it there according to David's advice. I had been wondering if I would get better performance by moving it to the FW drive, so that answers my question.

In general I've been impressed by the mileage I've gotten out of this iMac. I can run quite a few instances of Kontakt 3. I run into problems when I start using a lot of the modwheel instruments since they use more voices.

Until I hit the Lotto, this will be my system.

Thanks again!