Kanthos Posted January 27, 2011 Share Posted January 27, 2011 EDIT: 50 views and no comments, so maybe I'm not asking clearly. My laptop's hard drive is almost full, with a lot of samples. I have no OS CD and key, just a recovery partition. Should I: 1) Run all the samples from an external hard drive? If so, is a desktop drive in an enclosure any better than a portable USB-only hard drive? 2) Run the smaller samples from the external hard drive? Again, is an enclosure better than portable? 3) Try to find a way to clone the drive onto a larger laptop drive, and switch internal drives? 4) Find a way to get the key from the current Win 7 x64 install, get a Win7 DVD, and install to a newer, larger internal drive. EDIT: Original post I'm running out of space on my laptop's hard drive, to the point that I've had to uninstall most of my games to keep a reasonable amount of free space, and I even have a couple sample libraries sitting only on an external hard drive right now. The current hard drive I have is 500 GB and 7200 RPM; I'd only want a 7200 RPM drive internally. The only options I have are to get a larger hard drive and attempt to clone my current drive onto the larger one (as much as I love my Dell, the fact that I have a recovery partition on the hard drive instead of a recovery CD is a pain, so I couldn't just reinstall everything onto the fresh hard drive - or, is there a way around this?) or start using an external hard drive for some things. How bad would the performance be if I started running some or all of my samples off an external hard drive? If only some, which libraries would be best run from the laptop's hard drive and which would be best external? I've got Kontakt, Battery, EWQL SO Gold, StormDrum 2, EWQL Choirs, all the Impact Soundworks products, and NI's Vintage Organs and Vintage Keys libraries. Things like Koto Nation and Sitar Nation that I don't use often would be great candidates to go on an external drive. I also don't use EWQL Choirs often, but it probably uses more data at once than something like Koto Nation so it might be more important to have it internally. If I'm going the external route, would there be any practical reason to buy a normal 3.5" desktop hard drive in an enclosure instead of using the 500 GB Seagate FreeAgent Go Flex I have now? Would it perform better? Be less likely to overheat? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nebula Posted January 30, 2011 Share Posted January 30, 2011 How bad would the performance be if I started running some or all of my samples off an external hard drive? The answer I'd give is "not bad." I recently did some internal drive swapping in my desktop PC and in the process ran some Kontakt sample libraries from both an internal hard drive in an enclosure and from an actual external drive (7200rpm). I eventually got everything set up internally again, but during the interim I had absolutely no problems with either external drive setup. With the way Kontakt disk streaming works I'd reason that the seek-time related specs on the HDD are far more critical than the actual maximum throughput of the bus being used (say, SATA internally or USB externally), so as long as it's a good drive, it shouldn't matter whether it's internal or external. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moseph Posted January 30, 2011 Share Posted January 30, 2011 I used to run VSL SE on a laptop from a Firewire drive, and it worked okay. I tended to hit bottlenecks on RAM (I had 2 GB) about the same time I ran into drive bandwidth problems. I can't think of any reason a drive enclosure would be better than a standard external drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kanthos Posted January 31, 2011 Author Share Posted January 31, 2011 I'll give it a try, hopefully tonight, with running everything but my EWQL stuff from an external hard drive and see how playable it is - it especially matters for electric pianos and organs, stuff that I want to play in real time. Other than my EWQL stuff, Kontakt loads all my samples (well, that and Battery which I imagine is similar under the hood as far as streaming from disk), so I'll see how it works. The concerns I had with my external hard drive were power usage (it's USB powered; might a drive with its own power source do better?) and heat (because of the small casing, might a drive in a larger casing stay cooler). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arcana Posted February 1, 2011 Share Posted February 1, 2011 Forgive my nooby noobness, but what's the difference between a USB portable hard drive and a hard drive enclosure? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nabeel Ansari Posted February 1, 2011 Share Posted February 1, 2011 Forgive my nooby noobness, but what's the difference between a USB portable hard drive and a hard drive enclosure? The portable hard drive you can't open up and stick inside of your desktop. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kanthos Posted February 1, 2011 Author Share Posted February 1, 2011 Most external drives that you can buy are a normal laptop (2.5") or desktop (3.5") hard drive in a case that also supplies power. Going the enclosure route means buying an enclosure (the powered case, that converts from IDE or SATA to USB) and the laptop or desktop hard drive of your choice. I've never seen inside one, but I'd bet the enclosure leaves some space around the drive and also has some ventilation. The portable drives, like the Seagate one I linked in the first post, are smaller drives intended to be moved around instead of sitting on a desk, and most of them, if not all, are USB-powered and don't have an external power supply. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kanthos Posted February 2, 2011 Author Share Posted February 2, 2011 Gave it a shot last night and the performance from Kontakt-based samples running on my USB drive, which is probably not even 7200 RPM, was great, even for the biggest single sampled instrument I have (Alicia's Keys). I don't know how well it would hold up if I started running an entire orchestra from the hard drive, but I'm keeping that on my laptop regardless, so it looks like the problem's solved. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eilios Posted February 2, 2011 Share Posted February 2, 2011 I'm considering getting one myself for the very same purpose, actually. Would you mind sharing which you bought so I could do the same? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kanthos Posted February 2, 2011 Author Share Posted February 2, 2011 Well, I tried it out last night using the Seagate drive I linked in my first post. I'm now copying things around so I can instead use an older (and larger and better ventilated) Western Digital drive I have; I think it was a My Passport or MyBook or something. I think the key is what Nebula said about Kontakt's streaming, and also, specifically in my case, the fact that I shouldn't ever be using too many of the instruments on the external hard drive at the same time, so the USB connection doesn't end up being a limiting factor. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ghetto Lee Lewis Posted February 4, 2011 Share Posted February 4, 2011 If you're doing a lot of hard drive streaming from a laptop, you probably need more RAM. I just maxed mine out to 4 gigs, and it only cost me 40 bucks. I'm also looking for an external drive solution, since I'm running out of space and looking to get some larger libraries. I'll need something fast as hell with hard drive streaming if I'm going to use Hollywood Strings; 4 gigs of ram just won't cut it for something like that. Keep in mind also, if you're using USB 2.0, RPM's aren't going to matter as much. Although with USB 3.0 you will notice a difference up to 7200 RPM drives. Some external drives also use two USB drives. I don't know if this boosts performance or not, or if one of the ports is just used as a power source. Of course, some enclosures/drives require a separate power source. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Salluz Posted February 5, 2011 Share Posted February 5, 2011 This might be helpful: once I had purchased a Seagate external hard drive once. It used one USB port for storage/data transfers + power; the other one was strictly for power. At first I used one plug, and that almost killed the external HD. Then I used both plugs, which powered the external HD, causing it to function better rather than minimally, but then, as it was coupled with many other USB port processes, it killed my external HD and my computer, which was a shitty eMachines. Get good brands for both PCs and external HDs, use both USB plugs so that you have no power conflicts, and don't run too many other devices at once. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kanthos Posted February 5, 2011 Author Share Posted February 5, 2011 A lot of the larger drives have only one USB output plus a power adapter to make sure the hard drive has enough power; that's what I'm using right now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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