Space Conservation Help

Hello everyone. I am interested in purchasing Komplete 7, but there are a few complications that I hope will be resolved. First: This is my setup:

Macbook Pro with ~300 GB left and Steinberg Cubase installed.

It's apparent that since Komplete is about 90 GB, installing it to the primary hard drive might not be such a good idea. I am aware of the fact that I can install the actual sample libraries onto an external hard drive, but I know little about good affordable drives and about the advantages and disadvantages associated with using external hard drives.
Komplete 7 by itself is quite expensive, so the situation is troubling.
Would anyone be able to help me figure out how to proceed?

Thank you.

 

Seems like you have lots of space. I was barely able to squeeze Komplete 7 in one bit at a time while compressing. Upgrading to a 750GB drive gave me elbow room

Once you've got it installed, you can use HFS+ compression to reduce the files by a good percentage. The only really easy to use tool at the moment is Clusters, and it works in the background, so you might want to just exclude everything after the permanent data (instruments) is compressed. But you'd have over 200GB free, which I think should last a while! Data compressed in this way also loads faster, which is great when you use a lot of software instruments with many articulations (like orchestral instruments).

If you get an external drive to work with you can increase the efficiency of your system, in addition to having more room on each drive. You have the option of Firewire at the very least, and if it's one of the newer Macs you can also look into Thunderbolt devices as they start to crop up. The problem right now is that everything you can get is semi-pro to high-end RAID cabinets.

So, to summarise: You probably will be fine with the space you have, but look into a nice, cheap 1-2 terabyte Firewire enclosure/portable 3.5" drive to divide the load.

Clusters has saved me well into the double digits just on samples, even though the compression isn't geared towards sound. You'll save roughly the same amount you'd save on compressing a regular ZIP archive. The Kontakt and Battery libraries are the bulk of the installation, so you could move them (or some of it) to an external drive. Keep samples externally, save projects on the internal drive then.

 

I don't know why I can't respond to my own thread? An Admin must approve my post? I spent 5 minutes typing out a huge paragraph and it doesn't show up...

Basically I was asking if you could recommend any specific enclosures and hard drives for my purposes.
In addition I was wondering how to transfer the samples should i want to transfer them to or from a hard drive. Third, what would happen if i tried sharing the sample hard drive between two computers. Someone said in an older thread that he had problems when he tried doing the exact thing.

Thanks, and I'm looking forward to a response.

 

If you use Kontakt a lot, and large or a lot of samples, then you'll want a faster drive. But if that's not so important, even a cheap USB 2 drive would be fine.

I would have recommended Firewire a few months ago, but now I wouldn't.

There are a few reasons for that - one is that I just built a new computer for my wife and Firewire was ony available on the next more expensive motherboard. The second was that I bought a USB 3 drive enclosure and got phenomenol performance from it - better than SATA 1 on my own computer.

With Thunderbolt and USB 3 already here, this may be the end of life for Firewire.

All that being said, Firewire is still a great platform for older MACs.

 

Thank you, but I was hoping that someone could mention a SPECIFIC hard drive. I was unlucky enough to get my laptop before the new one with thunderbolt came out, and I'm not quite so good with product research. Would anyone be able to recommend?

 

Just drag a folder and drop. Then delete the original if you need the space back.

You should have a spare for backups, too.

Sharing between two computers - assuming they are the same OS and you are connected to only one computer (not on a network), I don't see the problem.

I have Mac and PC and I share between them by copying over a home network.

I use a USB docking station for backups - you plug in a drive quickly and swap easily. Slow, but universal and robust. Very inexpensive, too. I can plug in any 2.5 or 3.5 inch drive of any size on either my PC or Mac. But these are for temporary usage, like backups, cloning, and copying large amounts of data fro place to place. It also has an ESATA port if I need the speed.
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I usually buy Seagate 3.5 inch drives - the Barracuda version. I do this because I know Seagate makes all their own parts and has a long warranty period with an easy return policy.

 

Not really. Anything will do. I guess you'll manage just fine with just about any Western Digital USB drive. If you can get a hybrid Firewire/USB you're covered. Provided you do have the FW port on your MacBook, of course! Personal experience indicates LaCie drives are a waste of money. Just trashed one which completely stopped working after 18 months.

I know I can handle over 80 audio tracks (not softsynths) in Logic with my internal 7200rpm drive, and that's still not pushing its limits. FW800 is about half as fast as that drive's typical operating speed (which isn't the max of SATA), and USB2 is half that again. So for must ordinary purposes there's enough speed for live playback even with a bog-standard USB2 drive.

 

The last enclosure I bought (a few weeks ago) is by SIIG called SuperSpeed USB 3.0 to SATA 3.5 Enclosure Pro.

I see they have it at WalMart. I bought it at Fry's for $39.

http://www.walmart.com/ip/SIIG-3.5-SATA-SuperSpeed-USB-3.0-Hard-Drive-Enclosure-Pro/15737711


But I recommend this only if you will be getting USB 3 in the future.

Ron's advice above is good from my experience, too. Most hard drives are pretty good these days.
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Here's an old picture of a Google server. They probably have a half million servers like this, maybe a lot more.

If you blow up the picture you'll see Hitachi drives.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

 

I've heard Hitachi are big on the server side. We don't have many options in consumer drives anymore, with WD and Seagate buying up the other competition :/

Looks like Google's drives are SATA, but I expected SAS (the SCSI successor) which I thought used a different connector. If Google use consumer Hitachis they're cheapskates

 

This is an old picture.

Google made a report on their experiences with consumer drives, but they did not mention types.

They do buy things off the shelf, vey cheaply, and have good failure detection processes.

I don't have the report handy, it came out a few years ago and was quite interesting.

I'll see if I can find it again.
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http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
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There's something a lot of people don't realize. I saw the error rate on my last 1 Terabyte drive and calculated that there is about 1 error in every 8 terabytes of data transfer.

I think I that's accurate.

Cern has also reported on error rates since they collect a petabyte per second or something extreme like that.
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http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/ac...ionId=0&resId=1&materialId=paper&confId=13797

 

I'm starting to think that I may have to simply resort to installing the samples on the actual computer.

Here are ALL of the specifications:

http://www.everymac.com/systems/app...-2.66-aluminum-17-mid-2010-unibody-specs.html

Apparently it only has a 5400 rpm drive.
It DOES have a firewire 800 port.

Still I'm not sure if 300 GB is enough.

Thanks for all the responses everyone. I will check out all of the links right now.

 

Buy a 750GB or 1TB 7200rpm drive *when you need it*. It'll be quite a bit faster, but I bet you'll be fine until you feel your DAW is getting sluggish.

The OS X install disc comes with all the tools you need to copy your current drive to a new one, so I recommend getting a dock (not an enclosure) to make that job easier. Takes about 4 hours for 300GB on USB.

 

Thank you but please can you name specific products so I can find them? There are hundreds of products...I'll try to look. If you say that I can transfer the later, it's fine to install them on the actual computer first. Still I've heard that there are problems that result from transferring the samples because the program still searches in the first designated root folder.

 

Get something like this dock that you can put your future (larger) drive into while setting up and mirroring the drives. Goes well with a Seagate 2.5" drive (needs to be 9.5mm thick to be on the safe side).

Alternatively, just get a gigantic Seagate Freeagent or WD Elements.. 1TB variants will be less than half that price if money is tight, and I think that should last a while.

Get two. Make the other one your Time Machine backup. You won't regret that

 

I don't like to make recommendations like this, because there are a great many fine products out there, but I recommend what Ron just said in all respects.

I have a docking station very similar to that one and I use it on both my Mac and PC in USB and eSata, with 3.5 and 2.5 inch drives.

Great for cloning, copying, backup, etc.

I have a strange backup process since I have so many computers to manage, and I use Acronis, Retrospect, Drive Genius and Carbon Copy Cloner. I keep three copies of backups for my PC and two for my Mac and one for my wife.

And always remember: Jesus saves -- and so should you.

 

I don't like making specific recommendations either, but right now we have only two consumer-focused hard drive manufacturers left :/

My backup process is also strange. I have Time Machine back up a selection of my user files, not the system itself, to a regular WD Elements. Then certain things unlikely to change (or too big to bother redownloading) are put on different drives I stick in my dock as needed. One drive for program installers and instruments, another for 3D models, textures and such. The TM backup drive is attached most of the time, so I also keep music I listen to there rather than the OS disk.

I have about 350GB available out of a 750GB drive since I offload less essential stuff to external drives, and compress as much as makes sense. The used space consists of development and music tools, source code, instruments (NI making up the bulk, but some samples and loops too) and various other essential software. You can add about 11GB for the OS and 2x your RAM as the minimum used space before installing anything else.

 

Thanks for all the responses. At this point I think I will probably have to install the software onto my laptop directly and manage the space later on. I hope this temporary solution will be adequate until I can purchase a dock and hard drive.