Is it wise to run a daw and vst's straight from an external hard drive?

H

HEAVY_WEIGHT

Member
My pc crashed for the 100th time and lil bro swears it wasnt him even though Im not the one who put all these bootytalk flicks on there:mad:

Anyway I heard something like if everything is on an external, All i would have to do is just plug back in and im ready to go... but my concern is the speed and would that cause latency issues, if anyone has some advice i would appreciate it, im kind of holding out on installing everything until i get one.
 
yeah depends on the speed and size of the hard drive. i recommend a fast one using firewire. but once the project has loaded most of everything is in ram. it will occasionally check back with the hard drive. tell lil bro he gotta find another way to release his wiggles if yall serious about this music. video take up alot of memory. leave the programs on the main drive movies and sounds go on the external.
 
an installation of music tuned windows, your daw and program stuff completely, you maybe could load to this external hard drive young yoda
 
Last edited:
Anytime you are using a VST or RTAS based plug in you want to make sure that those effects are on your main hard drive. Even if you did get an external hard drive that support a fast transfer speed (such as firewire 800) the consistency of those drives and plug ins are going to be iffy at best.

So all in all, until you can upgrade your computers internal ROM (Read Only Memory) and RAM (Random Access Memory) just be patient and hold off on installing those plug ins to an external drive. Believe me, you don't want that nightmare in your life on top of everything else that you got going on. =)

Hope that helps.
 
put the apps and OS on the same hard drive...put all your data(songs, sounds, etc on another hard drive(internal or external...doesnt matter)...

if your pc crashed with that setp all u have to do is freload the os and reinstall your programs...all of your work is preserved....as an added backup....get a 3rd hard drive and every few weeks save the image of your main hard drive....u can actually do both if u really wanna be sick abougt security....and then if it crashes all u gotta do is reload the images and u right back to work....
 
If I were you I'd smack the piss outta little bro. I don't take that ****. lol

I would, if you can, start with backing up all the info you need, borrow a friend drive if you can, then formatting the drive, for best disc performance, you can set a different partition for each drive purpose (if you don't use seperate drives) a partition for windows/DAW/VST's, partition for recorded audio, and a partition for streamed samples (VSTi patches)

The worst thing about using an external drive for everything, is someone can just run off with your ****... all of it.
 
Buy your brother a cheap Netbook for him to watch his booties instead of getting yourself into the trouble of buying & installing software on an external drive.
 
las7154 said:
put the apps and OS on the same hard drive...put all your data(songs, sounds, etc on another hard drive(internal or external...doesnt matter)...

if your pc crashed with that setp all u have to do is freload the os and reinstall your programs...all of your work is preserved....as an added backup....get a 3rd hard drive and every few weeks save the image of your main hard drive....u can actually do both if u really wanna be sick abougt security....and then if it crashes all u gotta do is reload the images and u right back to work....
Click to expand...

Very helpful, thanks. Im sick of getting confused and searching through all these dvdr's i have. Its about time I got up to speed. But oh damn it would be nice if everything could run smoothly from externals with no prob... guess it was wishful thinking

and yes if anyone was wondering I gave lil bro the bizness, I kimbo sliced his ass :mad:... I think he has a thing for wesley pipes:confused:....
 
i use a buffalo 500gb external hard drive & i have all my music daws vsts,refills and samples on there i think its good because nobody can access my music with out the hard drive :) as for speed its just the same.
 
SCWbeats said:
...because nobody can access my music with out the hard drive
Click to expand...
Nobody could access your music without the external drive if you simply just saved just your music on it, too, but hey... if it works for you ;)
 
Man, i recently switched my DAW and plugins from a laptop to a desktop,, my desktop is a beast but i bought an 1TB external hd loaded all my apps on there,, the only thing tho, since i use Ableton, it requires it to have a special library(pretty much like any DAW), so i installed Ableton itself onto my 1TB hd and left the library folder on my C:// drive (main),, which means when installing VSTs for Ableton, i would have to place my VST .dll files in my library folder, BUT to preserve main hd space, i install the plugin folder into my program files folder on my 1TB hd,, I also have a 160GB ex hd but i only use that for music, videos, documents, and pics,, it works like a charm for me
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top