# Are external hard drives any good for big sample libraries?



## Rednas (Nov 7, 2012)

Hi all!

First of all: I'm new to this forum as an active user, but have been reading for more than a year. Still learning every day!

Right now I have a pretty bad setup, but I'm looking for improvements. I might need the option of mobility, so that's why I'm looking at a laptop and maybe later a good desktop.

Therefore the question: how would a USB3, 7200RPM, 32mb cache, 3TB external hard drive perform in loading and streaming samples? The amount of internal HD space wouldn't be enough for me on a laptop.

Greetings from the Netherlands!


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## JohnG (Nov 7, 2012)

Greetings to you and welcome as an active user!

Personally, I think a 3TB drive sounds awfully big as a single source for samples. And whether or not your USB3 setup will succeed also depends on what kind of music you want to write. Please tell us -- do you want to write major orchestral tracks, accompanied by guitars, synths, choirs and so on, or are you looking more at pop tunes or show tunes or just piano and strings?


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## Bunford (Nov 7, 2012)

I use a commercially available 3TB USB drive by Seagate and it works perfectly, even in fairly large orchestral pieces.

Might not be the best approach, but as mainly a hobbyist I needed a balance between cost, usability and performance.

I use the Seagate Backup Plus 3TB USB3 drive.


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## Rednas (Nov 7, 2012)

Hi John,

Thank you for the quick response. Currently I'm making pop music, recording vocals, guitars and keys myself. But I'm making more and more orchestra-heavy stuff now, and might be making some big orchestral tracks in the future. I'm relying on LASS2, Spitfire stuff, Symphobia, HW Winds, CineBrass Pro atm, but planning to buy more in the future. I want to get full potential out of these libraries first.

But am I correct you're saying several smaller hard drives are better?


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## JohnG (Nov 7, 2012)

I distribute my samples over several drives but they are inside PC slaves. If you're going the USB route I'm not sure whether that would be better or worse. Besides, I have switched over to SSDs inside my slave computers. 

It looks as though you have enough excellent libraries there to make great sounds -- congratulations and good luck with the writing.

Looks as though Bunford answered your original question rather well. Probably one of his better (implied) suggestions is to have a backup drive.


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## germancomponist (Nov 7, 2012)

Interesting. I have that older Tascam virtual piano on an USB stick, and it works pretty fine....


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## Nick Batzdorf (Nov 7, 2012)

Yeah, I put LASS on a 64GB Flash drive (which I brought as an experiment), and it works very well.


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## germancomponist (Nov 7, 2012)

Nick Batzdorf @ Wed Nov 07 said:


> Yeah, I put LASS on a 64GB Flash drive (which I brought as an experiment), and it works very well.



WOW!


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## NYC Composer (Nov 8, 2012)

germancomponist @ Wed Nov 07 said:


> Nick Batzdorf @ Wed Nov 07 said:
> 
> 
> > Yeah, I put LASS on a 64GB Flash drive (which I brought as an experiment), and it works very well.
> ...



+1- wow. What brand?


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## Andreas Moisa (Nov 8, 2012)

Cool, what about SD Memory Cards? Anyone tried this?


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## leafInTheWind (Nov 8, 2012)

Welcome to the forums! I'm currently running a caldigit 1TB av drive over firewire, seems to be doing fine for my purposes


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## Ned Bouhalassa (Nov 8, 2012)

Nick Batzdorf @ 7/11/2012 said:


> Yeah, I put LASS on a 64GB Flash drive (which I brought as an experiment), and it works very well.



Is this for real? >8o


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## JohnG (Nov 8, 2012)

leafInTheWind @ 8th November 2012 said:


> Welcome to the forums! I'm currently running a caldigit 1TB av drive over firewire, seems to be doing fine for my purposes



Which libraries are you running?


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## leafInTheWind (Nov 8, 2012)

Hi John, I'm running vsl, kontakt factory library and a few sampletekk kontakt piano libs.


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## JohnG (Nov 8, 2012)

Thanks. I'm impressed that USB and firewire can handle sample streaming that well. 

I like to use multiple mic positions in orchestral libraries and lately have been writing very busy, densely orchestrated material. I use SSDs for nearly all my samples these day and I think, at this point, to the extent that I hit bottlenecks, it's CPUs in a couple of my aging PC slaves.


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## leafInTheWind (Nov 8, 2012)

Hi John,
To clarify, I don't think my vsl libs are streamed, at least I don't think so as they take a while to load up. The kontakt stuff I have may be streamed as many seem to be set to DFD mode. Cheers


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## Nick Batzdorf (Nov 8, 2012)

John, LASS isn't all that voice-intensive. Hollywood Strings is in a separate category from everything else on the market as far as streaming is concerned.

The USB stick I have is generic, but sure USB 2 and FW can handle sampling just fine. And the reason is the same as always: bandwidth isn't the bottleneck until you get to hundreds of voices; what you need is seek time, and USB or FW have no effect on that.

I forget the maximum number of voices you can stream over a FW or USB 2 bus, but it's around 300.


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## germancomponist (Nov 8, 2012)

Yeah, so far as I know, the read time is much faster on USB sticks than the write time. And for samples, only the read time is important.


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## charlesparente (Nov 9, 2012)

Nick Batzdorf @ Thu Nov 08 said:


> John, LASS isn't all that voice-intensive. Hollywood Strings is in a separate category from everything else on the market as far as streaming is concerned.
> 
> The USB stick I have is generic, but sure USB 2 and FW can handle sampling just fine. And the reason is the same as always: bandwidth isn't the bottleneck until you get to hundreds of voices; what you need is seek time, and USB or FW have no effect on that.
> 
> I forget the maximum number of voices you can stream over a FW or USB 2 bus, but it's around 300.



wow! Completely fascinating stuff.

So what are typical maximum voice counts that users experience in big orchestral mock ups with tons of VIs and tons of midi tracks, regardless of which type of drive the samples are streaming from?

How can one track voice counts with a bunch of kontakt/Play/VE Pro, etc instances all playing at once?

Is there an easy way to determine that?

Thanks,
Charles


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## Graham Keitch (Nov 9, 2012)

Am I missing something? RAM is the critical thing these days - and as long as you have enough of it, you're well on the way. It just takes longer to load from an external drive. I have both SSD and external drives - but my 12GB of RAM is threefold more than I need for most of my templates so drive performance isn't critical.

Graham


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## Nick Batzdorf (Nov 9, 2012)

Graham, you understand the difference between loading entire samples into RAM and loading them into a head-start buffer with the bulk of them streaming off drives, right?

That was Gigasampler's big innovation - samples of unlimited recording length.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Nov 9, 2012)

Charles, it depends on the libraries you're using!

But don't get me wrong - you can make FW or USB drives gag pretty easily too, or as John says, you can run out of CPU for libraries with complicated scripting. The thing about the USB stick is that it works well until you start saturating the bus - it doesn't remove all the other issues.


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## charlesparente (Nov 9, 2012)

What are some of the ways that an external FW or USB drive can 'gag', if the voice count is kept below 300?

Sure I can spend $1600 on four 512GB SSDs, stick them in enclosures and presumably never have a dropped sample, but it will cost $1600 !!

I'm trying to determine what the fail point (dropouts, stuttering playback, etc.) will be with external SATA hard drives (USB3 or USB2 or Firewire or TB) but it seems an imprecise science, other than saying that the fastest disk read times will give the best sample playback/streaming performance, with the bandwidth of the USB/Firewire/TB connection itself rarely being exceeded.

Reading about LASS running on a USB thumb drive totally floored me!

I will probably be switching to a Mac Mini or iMac within the next 6 months and need to figure out how to stream my VI samples externally, balancing cost and performance.


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## Rednas (Nov 10, 2012)

Wow, nice to see so many replies, very helpful! My desktop ram is currently 8 GB of DDR2. I'm planning to buy a 16GB DDR3 ram laptop with a much better processor than I currently own, but there is still some doubt since my experiences with laptops haven't always been good (I'm sure you've heard of the DPC latency issues). It's just that I want to keep making music, which would be hard to do with a desktop because I'm going to travel a lot next year.

The debate around the external hard drive thing is interesting. The 1TB USB2 drive I have atm doesn't keep up with the bigger projects (there is a 'disk cache overload' in Cubase x64), so the next questions would be:
1. Is this a disk problem only or does it also have to do with ram and cpu?
2. Would a USB3 device perform much better for these sample-streaming tasks?


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## karmadharma (Nov 18, 2012)

USB3 is of course a lot faster than USB2, if you get an enclosure that supports UAS (USB-attached SCSI) you can get near-eSata-performance from USB3 since it will cut down your latency significantly.

From what I have read to use UAS you need an ivy bridge cpu/chipset and an enclosure that supports it, I think the latest OWC ones do as well as the BlacX 5G single drive.

Using a large drive for external samples (say 2TB) is advantageous because you can short-stroke it quite effectively if your interface has enough bandwidth, if you have a 2TB drive and create a 500GB partition for your samples on the outside of the HD (first partition) it should give you much better performance than if you got a smaller HD and filled it up.

This said nowadays if it was me I'd just buy a 512GB samsung 830 SSD for $400 and call it a day, SSDs are starting to get cheap enough that rotational HDs don't seem that worth it anymore for disk intensive applications like sample libraries are. In terms of USB sticks for USB2.0 you're still limited by the (slow) protocol, as much as your USB stick reads fast with USB2.0 you're still limited to iirc 20-25MB/sec transfer rate, which is abysmal.

Not sure if there are any USB3.0 sticks around that support UAS, but spending $100+ on a 64GB USB3 stick seems like wasted money when you can get a low-end SSD for about the same price...


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## JPQ (Nov 27, 2012)

Good know i going get USB2 (becouse FW stuff price is clearly higher and i dont know if fw is removed someday form macs totally i hope not but as we know Apple makes some times weird things) for my samples.
ps. btw i dont need much samplelibraries actually few good is all what i can even dream my money income simple dont allow software with hunders euros. i try learn few good ones good way and one other reason why i dont care many big libraries. One is installing time. Is i must do it again eats working time. and big libraries needs big harddrive.


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