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/may0...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.

[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?

[davethedrummer]

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