Hollywood Strings hard drive or internal?

[kevinmathie]

Hi all,

I just got Hollywood Strings in the mail. The software, of course, comes on its own hard drive which I can use, but I thought I'd get your advice.

Should I transfer the library to my internal drive, or should I use the drive it came with? I don't have a fantastic internal drive. It's just a normal SATA that spins at 7200 rpm. So, I don't know what advantage I would have from the internal drive, unless the transfer speeds are faster than a Firewire 800 external drive.

On the other hand, there's probably an advantage of copying the data over to my internal hard drive and keeping the HS drive on the shelf as a back-up just in case my "Sounds" hard drive crashes someday (Yikes! Quick. Knock on wood...), even if I don't get any performance increase from my internal drive.

Thoughts?

Kevin

[andygabrys]

Hi Kevin

I think HS and the other EW stuff that is on a drive used to ship on a 6 gb/s WD caviar Black 7200 RPM drive - which is a good fast drive with a good warranty - depending on your computer it might even be overrated - if you had a mac pro, the drives busses are only 3gb/s . I believe in the fine print someplace EW also say they will send you a replacement drive if yours goes down.

Your internal drive is going to be faster than an externall FW 800 drive - as the FW drive is rated up to 800mb/s i believe whereas the internal drive would be transferring at a maximum of 3000 mb/s (3 gb/s) or 6000 gb/s. Of course this is the maximum through the connection, the physical speed of the drive is going to knock that performance down significantly .

all that being said, if you were in the middle of a project and the drive went down, it would be a day or two for you to get a replacement drive from EW.

if it were me, I would look at transferring all the HS stuff from the supplied drive to the fastest drive I had in my system. That way if the drive that I was using for HS ever went down, I would have the entire package ready to go on the spare drive and drop it in.

If that is a Mac Pro, buy an SSD to put internal. If that is a macbook Pro - consider getting a data doubler from OWC http://www.macsales.com and replace the optical drive in your macbook with an SSD and the internal drive you have now.

If the only other solution is to use the external drive, well, there you go. you could also buy a USB 3.0 (backward compatible to USB 2.0) drive dock from OWC (called the voyager) for $35 and put the bare drive in it.

it sort of depends on your machine. if you have a newer machine with USB 3.0 ports etc. you are going to have a great range of options.

my 2 cents.

[kevinmathie]

Thanks Andy!

'K, I think I'll transfer the data to my internal hard drive. I didn't know that the internal bus speeds were so much faster than Firewire 800. That's good to know!

I wish I could afford a SSD, but I'd need a very large drive which is cost prohibitive for me right now. I looked up a 1TB SSD this morning, and it's $999. Yikes. I'm going to have to wait. Maybe I could buy a 10,000 rpm drive in the meantime.

Thanks again for the info!
Kevin

[richmstudios]

Probably too late to offer you this advice but...

My understanding and experience show that best practices involve a system with various dedicated drives to improve performace while tracking and mixing. I use Pro Tools as my DAW and it resides on my internal system drive as does various other sample library engines/applications (this gives my internal system all the power it needs to perform the CPU-intensive tasks required to process audio i/o). I also have TWO external firewire drives: one to read and write the Pro Tools audio data (music tracks) and another one dedicated soley to the sample library instrument files (which can be quite huge). All three drives work in tandem to optimize resources rather than putting the full load on the system drive.

It was my understanding that EW supplies you with the external drive not only to minimize the installation time but to also act as a dedicated drive for the instruments to improve system performance.

My 2 cents...
Rich

[Russell Landwehr]

Sorry to jump in here, but I'm trying to wrap my head around this. ( I'm considering a reconfig in my studio and every bit of info helps)

Rich, do I have this right, in your setup:

Drive 1 - System, Programs and Engines (internal)
Drive 2 - Recording and play-back of audio files (external firewire)
Drive 3 - Sample Data for the Engines on Drive 1 (external firewire)
Are you running MAC or Windows?

Also, I thought FireWire got throttled down and 800 and 400 aren't actual... is my info outdated?

And my other question, there have been two different ways of sampler play-back. 1. engine loads the first part of the sample and streams the rest from disk. 2. engine loads the whole sample into memory and the disk sits idle during playback. I've never looked under the hood on this stuff. What is the norm now?

[andygabrys]

I think that the 3+ drive setup is the only way with standard SATA drives to get the bandwidth necessary to run the OS, record / playback, stream samples, and stream video simultaneously.

I say with "SATA drives" because I have a feeling this is going to change some with SSD's becoming cheaper and more the norm. Alexander Orest is the one person I know at this point who has two 512 GB SSD;s in a Macbook Pro and its apparently screaming fast.

And when it comes to speed, external drives running FW400, 800, or USB 2 or 3.0 might be effectively faster than trying to stream everything off the internal SATA drive in a laptop for example.

this is due to the read / write head skipping around the disk trying to load and write a large amount of data simultaneously. Especially if the first thing you put on the drive was your samples (and I think they usually get put on the outside of the platter where the speed is greater) and then much later you are filling up your disk and the project your are working on is stored more on the inside of the platter. The drive head can physically more fast enough to stream samples at the same time as reading / writing the project.

from slow to fast (based on personal experience now using Mac laptops and Macpros) and assuming all SATA drives (no SSDs)

1. laptop running everything off the internal drive
2. laptop with one external drive
3. laptop with multiple drives especially running off different interfaces (like one FW400, and one USB 2.0 so you don't overload the FW buss by running two drives off it)
4. desktop using multiple internal drives. the more the better. the internal SATA buss usually runs at 3 gb/s or 6 gb/s at this point.

I am not certain about EW giving the drive and why, but Native Instruments supplies Komplete 8 ultimate on a small hard drive - and it won't let you run Komplete 8 off it - you need to install it on another drive in your machine. I guess the NI idea is to provide a fairly bombproof fast / install / reinstall system, as Komplete 8 ult is about 240 GB - that is a lot of DVD swapping.

[jimmymio]

I would recommend not using the system drive. It's a well accepted adage that you want your samples on their own drive. If you use lots of large sample libraries you might have several "sample" drives. If you remain unsure I would recommend checking with the manufacturer.

[orest]

Hi!

Andy is correct. I use SSD drives. And they are fast, very fast!
If you are composing a lot with VI's, the CPU's and the hard drives are the most important thing!

Another way to get a faster hard drive is to raid-O two hard drives.
This is a more "unstable" option, but so far it is working on my other computer, an MSI laptop with a raid-0 1.5 terrabyte hard drive.
The speed is twice as fast than a regular 7.200 spin drive.

You will need 2 identical hard drives to do this, and they need to be internal for optimum speed.

I'm going to use my thunderbolt port when things are evolving in this area.. it's a sata 10 connection, faster than the internal speed of max 6 today.

I know that EW's new libraries are pretty demanding, so invest in a good hard drive for streaming!

[jdhogg]

The way to make your comp powerful is to have all the samples in memory so the os does not need to go to any disk.
That way the only gain from having ssd's for all your data is when the sounds are required to be loaded into memory.

There are 2 main limiting factors in performance when running a project in a daw.

1. cpu - this is mainly crunching the numbers and is used in mixing, fx.
2. cpu's access to data - i.e. getting the audio to process - the fastest way to get it is from ram - then ssd - then sata.

If the system runs out of memory it uses a swap file on the os drive.

So for a big improvement for minimal cash get a small cheap yet fast ssd just for your os then buy as much ram as your board can take so that hopefully you wont have to access the sample/audio drives at all.

So
1. os on ssd 1
2. samples on sata disk 1
3. audio on sata disk 2
optionally add another sata if you use a lot of video and you get problems.

[Russell Landwehr]

The way to make your comp powerful is to have all the samples in memory so the os does not need to go to any disk.

That's what I was thinking.

If the system runs out of memory it uses a swap file on the os drive.

Um... does anyone use that swap file? I've disabled that in every DAW system of mine for the past 2 decades.

So for a big improvement for minimal cash get a small cheap yet fast ssd just for your os then buy as much ram as your board can take so that hopefully you wont have to access the sample/audio drives at all.

That would be if you are hitting the swap file.