Sonic Reality

NTR · Post by **NTR** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 4:06 am

............ but the users in this area tend to use all of the IK products I use, so here goes.

Thanks to squids and the esoundz guys and gals, I am running out of space on my drive!

I know this is a problem for others too, and I am left wondering if it would be better to have 1 big honkin external drive working via firewire or usb 2, or add a drive internally? Speed wise, is there a benefit either way?

Typically, I only use ez drummer or drumcore and either sonic synth or sampletank in any given project at one time. Do you think I would have any problems? The only usb device in my set up currently is my audio interface, nothing on the firewire bus, and I have a dual core AMD pc.

Any advice would be great. I have been thinking about a 1 terabyte external, help here would help me with the decision.

Thanks,
Vaughn

geoffrey · Post by **geoffrey** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 4:11 am

I am on an IMac, but I have a 1 Terabyte external rockin. It is some sort of OWC product. I like their stuff. It's RAID, fast, good for audio stuff... YMMV..
G.

buscemi · Post by **buscemi** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 1:33 pm

I have my SampleTank, Sonik Synth, Miroslav (Full and CE), SampleMoog, SampleTron, all the sounds from group buys and purchased directly from esoundz, a few Expansion Packs and more running from an external 500GB Western Digital Elements drive I got for like $65 at Target. I run that about half the time, other half of the time they are run on Receptor.

Up until last night I also had my EZDrummer sounds (original plus all expansions except Claustrophobic) on that same drive. I moved them to my new bigger, faster internal drive on my laptop so I could bring the laptop over to the new set of V-Drums and not have an external drive hanging off it there. Before that, though, it worked wonderfully.

Oops, sounds/kits for Infinite Player and all Retanks plus probably more random esoundz stuff is on that external drive too and work like a charm.

NTR · Post by **NTR** » Wed Mar 18, 2009 3:23 am

Thanks guys, sounds like it should do the trick then. I guess if I end up with any troubles, I have a drive for backups anyway.

Do you have any preference over firewire or usb? how about drive cache? The more the better I presume?

Thanks again.

Vaughn

DarkStar · Post by **DarkStar** » Wed Mar 18, 2009 9:23 am

I've read that FW is better (and eSATA even better than that). Especially as your audio interface is on USB.

Yep, bigger disk cache the better. 16MB or more, if posible

An internal disk would be better (faster). Or you might consider 2 500GB drives (on a FW daisy-chain). If the 1TB drive fails then you lose it all.

I've got a LaCie 750GB FW / USB / eSATA external disk here. Runs fine for me on FW. It's backed up completely to a similar disk (which I run up every few weeks to keep it on its toes).

buscemi · Post by **buscemi** » Wed Mar 18, 2009 1:15 pm

Mine's a USB drive if that makes any difference. Only one FireWire port on my MacBook Pro and it is taken by my interface and I'm interested in daisy-chaining a drive (since I may be daisy-chaining a second instance of the interface at some time in the near future).

NTR · Post by **NTR** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 4:24 am

Exuse my ignorance, but how do you daisy chain 2 external drives, and for what purpose? Does 1 drive plug into the pc, and the 2nd drive into the first, to copy to 2 drives simultaneously??

I've Never heard the term daisy chain used with drives before.

DarkStar · Post by **DarkStar** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 7:28 am

Yes; for FireWire:

The PC is connected to the first external drive, which is then connected to the second drive. The first drive will need 2 FW sockets. And it would be best (essential?) to use power supply adaptors (not rely on the FW bus for powrer). Check with the manufacturer / supplier.

Then each drive can appear as a separate drive to your PC (for example, drives K:\ and L:\), or if you partition each external drive, they can each appear as multiple drives. Here one of my drives appears as drives M:\, N:\ and P:\ and the other drive as Q:\, R:\ and S:\.

I do that so I can put different categories of files on the different drives, to keep them organised.

Neither USB nor eSATA are daisy-chainable, as far as I know.

HTH

buscemi · Post by **buscemi** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 12:59 pm

DarkStar is correct, and just for reference I was really talking about daisychaining a drive off of my FireWire audio interface not another drive (though same concept anyway - though when daisychaining that way you really have to check if your device supports it, where drives are pretty brainless about it audio interfaces not necessarily so).

Reverend Rhythm · Post by **Reverend Rhythm** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 1:37 pm

I've gone a little crazy with all this. I have 4 internal drives and an external drive for backup. I have one drive dedicated to samples for Kontakt, IK, BFD, and Wusik samples. I also have a drives for the system and programs, for loops, and for audo recording. I didn't intend to do this, but it just worked out that way.

buscemi · Post by **buscemi** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 2:04 pm

Yeah it can get crazy, I actually have a few external drives for different reasons too - my main one is the one I care about most, well perhaps the backup drive is more important come to think of it. I hope to grab one of the Mercury rackmounts from OWC and be done with it some day (up to 4TB racked up *drool*).

Sascha Franck · Post by **Sascha Franck** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 2:15 pm

If you don't intend to switch over to a laptop any day soon (and probably even if you have such plans), go for an internal drive in favour of USB and FW. No need to pay for an external case, probably less noisy, too, and performance should be better as well, especially in case you also make use of disk streaming.
This is really one of the things I hate ever since I switched to a laptop as my main audio machine. By now I have external drives worth around 3-4 TB (plus some backup drives) and they're driving me mad sometimes.
Really, on a desktop machine, when you don't move files around to other machines very often, there's absolutely no purpose in getting external drives. And as said, external drives, unless connected via eSata, will be slower, too.
Having said that, if you still decide to go for an external drive, to actually benefit from it, it should be FW 800 (or eSata, which probably requires buying an extra PCI card). USB 2.0 and FW 400 arrangements are noticeably slower on all accounts.

Bottomline: Internal drives = cheaper and faster.

Fwiw, somewhen this year I will finally again build me a more or less high end PC (I'm now using a Macbook), and believe me, it'll be stuffed with drives to the brim.

Cheers
Sascha

hydemusic · Post by **hydemusic** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 3:02 pm

Sascha Franck wrote:If you don't intend to switch over to a laptop any day soon (and probably even if you have such plans), go for an internal drive in favour of USB and FW. No need to pay for an external case, probably less noisy, too, and performance should be better as well, especially in case you also make use of disk streaming.
This is really one of the things I hate ever since I switched to a laptop as my main audio machine. By now I have external drives worth around 3-4 TB (plus some backup drives) and they're driving me mad sometimes.
Really, on a desktop machine, when you don't move files around to other machines very often, there's absolutely no purpose in getting external drives. And as said, external drives, unless connected via eSata, will be slower, too.
Having said that, if you still decide to go for an external drive, to actually benefit from it, it should be FW 800 (or eSata, which probably requires buying an extra PCI card). USB 2.0 and FW 400 arrangements are noticeably slower on all accounts.

Bottomline: Internal drives = cheaper and faster.

Fwiw, somewhen this year I will finally again build me a more or less high end PC (I'm now using a Macbook), and believe me, it'll be stuffed with drives to the brim.

Cheers
Sascha

Now that I am getting familar with all these 10,0000 or more loops. I'm sorting out what I use the most and put on my "D" sata drive for files and loops, my "C" sata drive is for the program material both are 500gb and use an external usb drive to store what I don't use. Remember Sample Tank can play all the IK loops so if you direct your loops there, it can take a month of Sundays to load. Now it starts right up in a dash. If I need something I just go to explorer and search.

P.T. · Post by **P.T.** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 11:32 pm

Is there any difference in performance between, say, a 500gb drive and a 1 terabyte drive?

I realize there are specs for this, but I am looking for a 'real world' view on this.

Would 2 500 be better than 1 1-tera?

750?

NTR · Post by **NTR** » Fri Mar 20, 2009 5:16 am

hydemusic wrote:
Now that I am getting familar with all these 10,0000 or more loops. I'm sorting out what I use the most and put on my "D" sata drive for files and loops, my "C" sata drive is for the program material both are 500gb and use an external usb drive to store what I don't use. Remember Sample Tank can play all the IK loops so if you direct your loops there, it can take a month of Sundays to load. Now it starts right up in a dash. If I need something I just go to explorer and search.

I'm sorry, I am not sure I understand this correctly? Are you saying that if I have the sampletank app installed on my C drive and its samples on a separte drive, they will load faster?

Currently I do have my samples installed in the same location(C) as the program files. It does seem a little slow loading some times.

Thanks for the input guys. See........ I knew this was the right place for this question!

Sonic Reality

KVR Audio

This may not be the right place for this question?