Loading sample libraries from a USB Hard Drive

[Nabeel Ansari]

How efficient (slow/fast) is that?

I was considering taking out the laptop hard drive from my old laptop and using it to store Kontakt 4 as an external USB drive (with an enclosure).

I only ask because I'm wondering if there's a better alternative to uninstalling some games and moving data to a network drive to make room on my internal for Kontakt. I'm running a laptop, so buying a new hard drive is out of the question (not to mention expensive).

[Moseph]

It's kind of slow. I don't know if it would be too slow relative to how you're using samples or not.

I used to use a Firewire drive for samples on a laptop; I now have the same drive hooked to a desktop via eSATA (which makes it almost as fast as an internal drive) and the speed increase relative to Firewire is very noticeable. Load times for large projects are much shorter. The playback streaming performance is, I'm sure, also much better with internal/eSATA, but on the laptop I was pushing the limits of RAM and CPU already, so I'm not really sure how much of a playback bottleneck the Firewire connection was.

Another possibility is to buy a larger replacement internal drive for the laptop, then use a USB enclosure to transfer things from the old drive to the new drive. (EDIT: n/m, forgot that you were pulling the second drive from an old system, not buying it.)

EDIT: Or you could use the USB drive for games and data and put Kontakt on the system drive. I don't know how using a USB drive for games would impact game performance, but it probably wouldn't be as adversely as using USB for samples would impact sample streaming performance.

[luhny]

I am not too sure how Kontakt works, but: are you talking to outsource just the samples itself?

If Kontakt preloads samples into the RAM of the DAW I see no reason why it would affect your live performance. Of course loading times of projects and preset loading in Kontakt itself will also take longer - everything that accesses the external hdd will take longer than an internal flow.

so with Kontakt itself on your internal drive, but your samples outsourced, i think you can still do good.

Although I could be horribly wrong - as I said, I am not sure how Kontakt actually works in terms of data transmission and sample loading. Just an idea.

cheers,

-Luhny

[Moseph]

I am not too sure how Kontakt works, but: are you talking to outsource just the samples itself?

If Kontakt preloads samples into the RAM of the DAW I see no reason why it would affect your live performance. Of course loading times of projects and preset loading in Kontakt itself will also take longer - everything that accesses the external hdd will take longer than an internal flow.

so with Kontakt itself on your internal drive, but your samples outsourced, i think you can still do good.

Although I could be horribly wrong - as I said, I am not sure how Kontakt actually works in terms of data transmission and sample loading. Just an idea.

cheers,

-Luhny

I'm not sure about Kontakt specifically, but usually sample use involves both loading to RAM and streaming from disk since the patches are often too large to fit entirely in RAM. Sometimes you can set an option that will force it to load everything into RAM and not stream -- I know PLAY has this feature; I don't know about Kontakt.

[Fishy]

I assume it's probably similar to the experience I have running games from an external hard drive.

Your load time is severly compromised, but once it's in your RAM you don't notice any performance drop until you try and stream data.

[zircon]

Disk streaming is actually a new development; before Gigastudio, all samplers loaded into RAM by default. So, of course Kontakt has this capability. But most modern samples are so big, you generally wouldn't want to do that.

Anyway, a USB drive is fine provided it's 7200rpm... I know a lot of composers that do this with no problems to speak of.

[Nabeel Ansari]

Anyway, a USB drive is fine provided it's 7200rpm... I know a lot of composers that do this with no problems to speak of.

Oh that throws my idea out the window. My 4 year old laptop ain't gonna have a 7200 RPM.

[Kanthos]

It might, you don't know unless you check.

I wouldn't say it's *impossible* to use a slower hard drive either, just that you can't expect to have many tracks going in real time. Be prepared to do a lot of freezing of tracks.