Ableton - External Drive Streamin

[module]

hi all

friend was tellin me he finds his laptop more efficient when streaming his tracks from his external hard drive.. says the fact that the onboard hdd runs apps & the external hdd streams audio makes his laptop more stable..

i aint convinved, so i thought i would ask the educated masses.. YOU LOT :)

i only use short WAV loops.. from 4 thru to about 16 or maybe 32 beat.. 4 channels maximum.. i never EVER have glitches or pops or stops or ANY inconsistency with my current set up.. i have the lap stripped of everything i dont use.. drivers for onboard sound etc are all gone & half of windows has been removed..

jus wondering if the external streaming might free up jus a lil bit..

cheers to all in advance :)

[rhythmtech]

nope. it wont.

your best bet is to partition your hard drive into 2 or 3 areas.

my set up is as follows

250gb internal drive

1 30gb for windows partition - partition :C

2. 100gb for apps/vst etc - partition :D

3. 120gb for samples and current projects. - partition :E

i then have 2 500 gig external drives.

1. loops(these can be imported into current project when needed) and my mp3s :F

2. ghost image of main drive and back-ups of installation files and music backup. :G


Ii then used disk management to rename my dvd drives to :X & :Y - this means i can add more hard drives in the future without the fear of drive letters getting mixed up (this happened me in the past and i ended up with an external set to location: 0 which is a bugger to sort out.)

also when installing apps with large libraries (kontakt, trilogy etc) i'll install them onto the external F drive as once a patch is selected the samples are stored in memory so they arent streamed.

[Barely Human]

Some good info here on audio performance and hdd's - http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may05/articles/pcmusician.htm

[RDR]

I've never had a problem streaming entire peices over USB2 with either pro-tools or logic or ableton.

[rhythmtech]

I've never had a problem streaming entire peices over USB2 with either pro-tools or logic or ableton.

its not a problem.. but it certainly wont make things more efficient.

[davethedrummer]

depends on the speed of the harddrive in the laptop
they're normally pretty slow

[RDR]

its not a problem.. but it certainly wont make things more efficient.

Possibly, but it really does mean your not using the HD quite so much, which can only be a good thing?

[acidsaturation]

This has just made me think a bit, I never realised you could get a TB of external drive for not a lot over a ton now...

That's not a lot more than than many blank CDs, and my dream of having my whole sample and music library in one place may be closer...

[RDR]

This has just made me think a bit, I never realised you could get a TB of external drive for not a lot over a ton now...

That's not a lot more than than many blank CDs, and my dream of having my whole sample and music library in one place may be closer...

There are other things to consider when purchasing drives from manufacturers such as WD and IOMEGA, often its not easy to get the drive OUT of the enclosure they provide. Its probably a better bet to buy a decent enclosure and fill it yourself with a drive you know you can rely on.

As an aside ive benn waiting for NAS boxes to come down in price (right now they are stupidly expensive and for no real reason i can fathom other than supply/demand stuff) I have had a USB2 WD drive attached to a windows XP box on the house machine downstairs and then shared across the network, AND used this to play samples across an 802.11g network without much problem when using ableton. obviously long samples are a bit much for it, but prevewing and then saving self contained worked very well indeed. Im waiting for a decent 802.11n series and a decent NAS box, i was considering an ICY BOX or a Buffalo...

Anyone got other experiences of this??