External hard drive - samples or projects

[rainstick]

Hi, might be a bit of a vague question but i have an external hard drive and i was wondering whether it would be best to run the samples from this or logic song projects....? Which one would relieve my internal hard drive of the most stress?

 

Also - any tips or tricks relating to this would be ace as i've never moved loads of stuff like this before and doing so always scares me a bit!!

 

cheers

[Eric Cardenas]

What kind of projects are they?

Mostly audio based recording or is it mostly Samplers and other Software Instruments?

[rainstick]

cheers eric, mainly using samples.... but if i transfer a project from NI maschine then i guess that would be the equivalent of using mainly audio? so a mixture.... depends how i approach the track...

 

( i guess ) what you're saying though is whatever i use the most - put that onto the external hard disk?

[Eric Cardenas]

( i guess ) what you're saying though is whatever i use the most - put that onto the external hard disk?

 

I wish it was that simple!

They are a lot of Sampler and other Hybrid Synths. They all behave differently although most of them now are actually being loaded into RAM instead of trying to stream from the disk.

 

Here's how I see it.

Your computers internal harddrive is almost always going to be faster than any external drive connected via USB2, FF400 or FF800 protocol.

Huge sample libraries on your system drive will not only take up a lot of space but will also put their shared deal strain when loading samples. Projects with a huge amount of audio files will also take up a lot of space and will put a lot of strain on your disk.

Depending on your situation it could be better to free up a lot of space on your system drive.