will an external hard drive help to optimize performance on my pc???

[coldcoldhands]

I was wondering if moving my reason refill folder to an external hard drive mould help to optimize my pc's performance??? Sorry if this is a lame question. I picked up the chambre refill and I'm having some difficulties since...

[kitekrazy]

Maybe if were a SSD drive but that would increase loading speed.  Maybe you could explain the difficulties.  If it's a sample based refill, memory would be the issue.

[Kazz]

I was wondering if moving my reason refill folder to an external hard drive mould help to optimize my pc's performance??? Sorry if this is a lame question. I picked up the chambre refill and I'm having some difficulties since...

Running out of RAM is more likely to be the issue with large ReFills like this. See if you can upgrade that, especially if you only have 8 gigs or less. If you already have 16 or more, make sure you don't have other programs taking up too much memory at the same time.

[Eagleizer]

I was wonderin9g if moving my reason refill folder to an external hard drive mould help to optimize my pc's performance??? Sorry if this is a lame question. I picked up the chambre refill and I'm having some difficulties since...

No! Not unless your internal HDD or SSD have problems. If you
have failing sectors on on your internal HDD, Windows will try
to read the files in that sector, over and over, slowing down 
the loading. 

You should test your HDD with HD Tune. Run a full test. 
Don`t trust others who say otherwise! External disk will 
NOT make your PC run faster. (Period) If it does, your 
internal HD have problems!

Even with USB3 Boost from ASUS, your internal drive will
perform faster unless it`s considerably slower than your 
external drive and the speed of the port it`s connected to
is faster than the internal speed. 
(Not likely)

If you have 16GB of RAM or more, you could run RAMDisk 
and put the Refill you are working on on that. (I highly 
recommend RAMDisk!)

If your MB supports it, you could dedicate an SSD to run as 
CacheDisk. This will in time speed up everything on your PC.

Some info on your setup would be helpful, to help YOU


Cheers


P:S: Give us some specs of your PC.... Brand, RAM, CPU, MB... 

[Mastrcode]

Have you activated the energy save mode of your OS? This can also be a problem. Because in some energy save modes the harddrives will be turned off after a specific time period, when the computer goes into idle mode to save energy. And it takes some time when the drives jump on again. It's recommended, to turn the energy save mode off in your OS, while working with your DAW. Even the CPU can be slowed down in energy save mode, if nothing is using CPU when the machine is idle or the cpu will just run wih the maximum needed speed of all running processes at the moment (e.g if all running processes need together 30% of the CPU, then the CPU also just will run with 30% instead of it's maximum capacity). So it's better turning the energy save mode always off on a music production machine.

[Ostermilk]

Don`t trust others who say otherwise! External disk will 
NOT make your PC run faster. (Period) If it does, your 
internal HD have problems!

I beg to differ.

An external disk can help performance bottlenecks when you have multiple processes accessing different areas of the same disk simultaneously.

So if you have an application that is  making calls to the OS drive and loading samples in at the same time then offloading some of the bandwidth to an external drive will certainly improve performance in those circumstance.

Why do you think many music PC's are divided up as OS Drive, Samples Drive and Project drive or something similar? It won't make your computer faster per se but it will certainly ease one of the most common bottlenecks that cause it to slow down.

If you are on Windows merely putting your swap file on another drive will certainly improve performance and eliminate a lot of  'disk thrashing', there are even small capacity SSD's that are sold as 'cache drives' specifically for that purpose if you can't run to the cost of a larger capacity SSD.  And even if using an SSD OS drive you can still  gain some benefit by managing your disk resources properly. Categorically stating don't listen to anyone else as it won't make a difference is irresponsible (Period).