Running sessions & refills from an external drive

[dvdrtldg]

My laptop is getting very full - but I've got 45GB of refills and 50GB of Reason sessions sitting on it, so no wonder

Everything's backed up on an external drive, and I could theoretically run my sessions & refills from that - but it's only a USB2 connection and I'm not sure if that would slow things down. Anybody got any advice?

[moneykube]

I used to run my refills from usb2 drive… yes… slightly slower access time for sure

[dvdrtldg]

Slower access time, but does that mean the session doesn't run as smoothly? Or is it the case that once Reason has gone & found the refill, everything chugs along fine no matter where it's getting the refill from?

[moneykube]

I never pushed it far enough to run into any problems… but… song files were not huge… but not small either… should be good unless you have a million tracks… it seems ok once refills are searched and located

[yamguitar]

My refills are all on an external FireWire drive (actually my music files are all on two daisy-chained drives... One for the songs I'm working on, one for samples, refills, etc.). For a long time I thought system performance would be best with refills on my Mac's main drive, because they were somehow "closer" to the main CPU or something... more immediate access, right? But keep in mind, if your computer is trying to spin your hard disk up and seek back and forth on one platter for both system software and your refills, it's actually working harder than it needs to. With the samples/refills located on a separate drive, your main drive can concentrate on just running your software. It definitely will depend somewhat on the speed of both drives, but my external drives are all 7200 RPM and the system works great. I don't know about USB but I'd imagine it to be a similar story. ... and in any event, IMHO your system performance will jump more from keeping your main drive relatively lean and mean than it will suffer from trying to stream refill data over USB.


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