Improving speed/ workarounds for multiple VSTs

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Fluteloops

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i've been running Kontakt pretty heavily with alot of orchestral samples and stuff and it tends to slow down my computer a ton making it real hard. I have a 13 inch Macbook pro from 2011. I'm already planning to boost my RAM up (from 4gb to 16gb) which should help some but I was wondering what CPU one would run or how to work around the slow down caused by multiple audio units/VSTs. I'm working with an i5 intel core btw. Thanks any info would help greatly.
 
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There are a few things you can do to improve performance, you can add a second hard drive and stream the samples, so only the very beginning is loaded into RAM (the only downside is that unlike using SATA to connect hard drives as you would on a tower system you will have to use USB which taxes your CPU a little bit, but in theory you should still see an improvement) the other thing you can do to improve performance is to freeze your plugins, this renders them as a hidden audio file and temporarily disables them which uses far less of your CPU than if you leave them active. Another tip is to purge any samples from Kontakt that you are not using.
 
I have heard of people who "stream" the samples from an external harddrive although I'm not entirely sure it would conserve that much speed since I have quite alot of space on my harddrive as it is. What would essentially be happening by storing the samples on an external and having Kontakt locate them there vs on my harddrive?
 
The amount of storage you have on your hard drive is one thing, the speed at which your computer can access that hard drive is something else entirely, you see hard drives are not just used as simple storage like they were in the 80's where the activity light only came on when you opened a program or loaded a file, these days your operating system runs from the hard drive and the light will blink as data is streamed to or from it, when you record or play back audio from the hard drive you are streaming the audio to or from the hard drive, so if you have a shit load of streaming data you can share the load between two hard drives.

By the way, how fast is your hard drive, 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM?
 
it's 5400 rpm. I'm considering switching out the default hdd for a ssd but i'm still trying to figure out the most effective way to speed up stuff
 
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