Hollywood Strings hard drive or internal?

[richmstudios]

Just to get back to Russell's question on my system setup (MacBook Pro 17" BTW)...

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)

However, I do envy jdhogg's described setup: seems the easiest to understand/configure and much much faster than what I've got.

Rich

[jdhogg]

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.

You will get a faster boot time....for some thats a great thing.

The os will have a number of other reasons to write/read to its disk.

[jdhogg]

Personally the disks/memory have never been the limiting factor, its always the cpu due to fx but I dont use too many samples, I expect for orch people its the exact opposite so it depends on what music you are doing.

[Russell Landwehr]

Personally the disks/memory have never been the limiting factor, its always the cpu due to fx but I dont use too many samples, I expect for orch people its the exact opposite so it depends on what music you are doing.

Yes, CPU speed has always been the main thing, specially when trying to achieve near-realtime latency. Lately I've run out of memory, though, when running a lot of samples on a 32bit OS. I crashed Ableton a couple of times because of it.

I've also found that USB 2.0 has never hiccuped for me when running 32 streams at 44.1/16. (that's live performance real-time applications)

I checked my CPU, I have the fastest available for my motherboard already, so for me an OS upgrade to 64bit and loading up on memory is what I'll do. I like the idea of an external FW drive with the samples on it. I have an unused external FW drive.

I'm glad this thread came up.