KVR Audio

DevonB · Post by **DevonB** » Fri May 25, 2012 11:46 am

izonin wrote:A 24-bit 96KHz sample is 4Mb/s. USB 2.0 capacity for external HDD is 480Mb/s. The math gives us 120 voices of polyphony.

The only problem is you're talking theoretical maximums of the USB2 bus. They are nowhere near reality. 480Megabits = 60 MegaBytes. If you are very very lucky, you'll get 30-35MB/sec on USB2.0. USB has *HEAVY* overhead. FW400 can and does do slightly better because of less overhead, even though its theoretical bandwidth is less.

So best case scenario would be 60 notes poly, if you're lucky for the outlined scenario above.

Devon

izonin · Post by **izonin** » Fri May 25, 2012 11:57 am

DevonB wrote:
izonin wrote:A 24-bit 96KHz sample is 4Mb/s. USB 2.0 capacity for external HDD is 480Mb/s. The math gives us 120 voices of polyphony.
The only problem is you're talking theoretical maximums of the USB2 bus. They are nowhere near reality. 480Megabits = 60 MegaBytes. If you are very very lucky, you'll get 30-35MB/sec on USB2.0. USB has *HEAVY* overhead. FW400 can and does do slightly better because of less overhead, even though its theoretical bandwidth is less.

So best case scenario would be 60 notes poly, if you're lucky for the outlined scenario above.

Devon

This is why I suggested maximizing the portion of the sample that is loaded into RAM (256KB should be enough) to eliminate the issues with the access time on the 5400rpm drive. The transfer rate of the internal drive should be more than enough for high polyphony.

DevonB · Post by **DevonB** » Fri May 25, 2012 12:04 pm

osiris, my appologies, I'm not trying to attack you or tear you apart on this, honestly. I just wanted to bulk it up some to add clarity and accuracy to the best of my ability because it read somewhat vague.

osiris wrote:One thing the clerk suggested was getting a regular hard drive and buying a case for it.

Great suggestion. Get a case that does eSATA and hook it up to an eSATA port to your PC, and it will be just as fast as an internal SATA drive. In order of perference from fastest to slowest interfaces for real bandwidth -

eSATA, Thunderbolt, FireWire800, Firewire400, USB 2. eSATA will always be best because there is no additional protocol conversion overhead like with TB, FW and USB.

The advantage was it would be just as fast as your internal drive.

Yes it would if it was eSATA, absolutely.

Yhe drawbacks are the cases are ridiculously expensive for what they are.

Just an opinion, and I can respect that. "Expensive" is relative to what you're willing to pay. I generally do agree with the statement though, especially once you get into eSATA, FireWire or USB3. However, there have been some external drives I've considered buying, ripping out the internal drive and using it because it was a better deal. Just wanted to point out that you can get better deals on external drives over internals sometimes.

You have to hook the drive up internally, and then you have to partition it correctly.

This was pretty vague. Yes, if you bought an internal drive and put it in an external case, you will have to partition it yourself. Every external drive I've personally have used was already partitioned and formatted, ready to go. So I do agree. But paritioning a drive is not rocket science either. No voodoo priest is necessary during the making of the partition.... unless the drive is DOA. Then maybe you do.

Devon

osiris · Post by **osiris** » Fri May 25, 2012 12:26 pm

Oh no, I didn't think that. Re: The cases. I was going from what I saw at Best Buy. There are some on Amazon that are $10.00. I think the cheapest at BB was $40.00.
@Devon, I'm not clear on the whole install procedure. I did some research when I was going to do this and apparently on the hard drive itself is a pin. To make it a 'slave', you have to set the pins a certain way. Then the computer will know it's not the main drive.
Partitioning scares me, but I have Easus Partition Manager
http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

It's free and seems idiot proof, but this idiot is still too chicken to try it..

AdmiralQuality · Post by **AdmiralQuality** » Fri May 25, 2012 12:29 pm

osiris wrote:Oh no, I didn't think that. Re: The cases. I was going from what I saw at Best Buy. There are some on Amazon that are $10.00. I think the cheapest at BB was $40.00.
@Devon, I'm not clear on the whole install procedure. I did some research when I was going to do this and apparently on the hard drive itself is a pin. To make it a 'slave', you have to set the pins a certain way. Then the computer will know it's not the main drive.
Partitioning scares me, but I have Easus Partition Manager
http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

It's free and seems idiot proof, but this idiot is still too chicken to try it..

What's wrong with OSX's built in Disk Utility?

And don't worry about master and slave jumpers. It has nothing to do with which drive is the "main" one. Just leave it (unless it completely doesn't work).

DevonB · Post by **DevonB** » Fri May 25, 2012 12:42 pm

osiris wrote:Oh no, I didn't think that. Re: The cases. I was going from what I saw at Best Buy. There are some on Amazon that are $10.00. I think the cheapest at BB was $40.00.

There's going to be huge difference in the cases depending on cooling and interfaces available on the case. Obviously, the more there is, the more expensive it gets.

@Devon, I'm not clear on the whole install procedure. I did some research when I was going to do this and apparently on the hard drive itself is a pin.

Not really. It really depends on the case of how 'easy' it is. The basics are a piece of cake. SATA has 2 connectors; 7 pin data and 15 pin power. They are both keyed and you can't get it wrong. Well, a hammer will make anything work, but I digress.

Some cases are easy to put together, others are a pain, I agree on that. Connecting the drive is the easy part. If the case is well designed, it should also be easy as well.

To make it a 'slave', you have to set the pins a certain way. Then the computer will know it's not the main drive.

You're getting your wires crossed here. SATA does not do master/slave, period. That's old EIDE. Each drive gets its own SATA adapter; they do not share adapters whatsoever. Master/Slave for EIDE also only applies if two drives are on the same cable (the drives have to be set to master or slave, or the better choice was Cable Select, which would force one to master and one to slave automagically.) This does NOT apply to external drives whatsoever.

Partitioning scares me, but I have Easus Partition Manager
http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

It's free and seems idiot proof, but this idiot is still too chicken to try it..

Drive partitioning is a piece of cake. Go into Computer Management then Disk Management, you'll see the drive that has no partition on it, and in a few clicks, you're done. I'm positive there are at least 20 videos on YouTube that show you step by step how to do it, and plenty of web pages on the subject with screen shots.

Devon

musicworld · Post by **musicworld** » Fri May 25, 2012 9:30 pm

Hi guy's OP here, sorry to butt in but i was wondering if anyone could give an answer to my last post ?

AdmiralQuality · Post by **AdmiralQuality** » Fri May 25, 2012 9:37 pm

musicworld wrote:It's just come to mind which i should of mentioned in my original post. That all i intend to do is play the sample libraries themselves, that being the (Galaxy ll and Vintage D) and record them in GarageBand as solo piano tracks for later editing in post production. Will not be working with mass orchestral works or multiple sampled instruments to create high end scores.

I'm assuming with this approach without any heavy demands for multiple instrument streaming, there really shouldn't be a problem dumping the complete Library on to the WD 7200rpm External Drive via USB 2.O. In the hope that there shouldn't be any latency issues ?

Would this be fair to say ?

Sure. (Latency isn't an issue as the sample heads are already in RAM. It's only the sustained transfer rate that limits you in how many voices you can pull off disk simultaneously. Whatever that number is, it's quite a lot.)

But why not just try it?

ford442 · Post by **ford442** » Fri May 25, 2012 9:45 pm

external drives work for all kinds of stuff.. i could probably boot from a USB 2.0 SSD and get a performance bump from what i have now..

my friend has like 8 external drives at the same time.. not for music, but there is no issue..

like has been stated - there should never be a time when you press a note and the hard drive has to seek and get the sample before you can hear it.. many large banks have 'sample sets' within them - so, though you may have Omnisphere loaded (some 40 gb) - it will only bring into RAM the samples that are relevant to your current project which tends to be more on the order of 100mb to 2,000mb loaded into RAM upon loading you bank/project.. so, you see - latency of the HD should not come into play..

musicworld · Post by **musicworld** » Fri May 25, 2012 9:57 pm

Thanks for all your advice guy's, and to everyone else for your support. Will go ahead with the Library and see what the performance results are.

"Great forum" where would we be without KVR.

Musicworld.

AdmiralQuality · Post by **AdmiralQuality** » Fri May 25, 2012 10:04 pm

musicworld wrote: "Great forum" where would we be without KVR.

We'd be wading through old wives' tales on Gearslutz.

osiris · Post by **osiris** » Sat May 26, 2012 10:03 am

musicworld · Post by **musicworld** » Sun May 27, 2012 10:25 pm

The internal disk will be faster than any external disk. The USB interface will be the bottleneck, the overhead of the USB connection will be far greater than the difference between the 5400 rpm vs 7200 rpm.

Your probably right. I purchased the WD 7200rpm External Drive for speed purposes, which has now been defeated by the slow BUS of the USB 2.0. I'm now thinking it's just as well to install the Library on the Internal 5400rpm Drive as this will now probably be faster ? As long as there is enough disc space this should be completely fine no ?

AdmiralQuality · Post by **AdmiralQuality** » Sun May 27, 2012 10:30 pm

musicworld wrote:
The internal disk will be faster than any external disk. The USB interface will be the bottleneck, the overhead of the USB connection will be far greater than the difference between the 5400 rpm vs 7200 rpm.
Your probably right. I purchased the WD 7200rpm External Drive for speed purposes, which has now been defeated by the slow BUS of the USB 2.0. I'm now thinking it's just as well to install the Library on the Internal 5400rpm Drive as this will now probably be faster ? As long as there is enough disc space this should be completely fine no ?

Probably. Try it and see. Can't hurt to try, everything is reversible.

hibidy · Post by **hibidy** » Sun May 27, 2012 11:52 pm

just to be clear, I got a 5400 1TB usb 2.0 drive strickly for backup and it's the slowest, most pain-staking, wait wait wait, wait some more.........OMFG what is taking so long, horrible drive ever. I can only assume it's the 5400 part. It's a WD.

Western Digital HD For Music ???