Running everything off the internal drive?

[antonlamont45]

I know many people here are running live w/o an external drive.

Frankly it's a pain in the arse to have the external drive connected and to carry it around as Im sure others can sympathise.

Can I run everything on a internal 5400rpm drive, and will it mess up my startup disk, scrambling files all around in fragments, slowing down the disk?

And should I partition the internal disk, one part for OS and apps, one for audiofiles?

And if using the internal disk should choose the option to play audio clips from ram?

What is the current consensus on this? When I started a few years ago it was to have an external drive. I sense that things have changed?

_____
Macbook pro Unibody A1286 2.4ghz intel core duo

[nepotist]

I've been doing this for years, no running from RAM either. Haven't had any problems (until Live 8 of course, but that's another story). Never had a live show mess up or anything. I put a 500 gig drive in my MBP (3 years old 2 gigs RAM) and now everything is on my laptop, tracks, loops everything. Its great having it all in one spot.

[Tagor]

for special processes like handling a lot of samples or using VSTs with diskstreaming
it is recomended to have a system which uses two disk and 2 heads for reading from the disks:

the one head read the sample data from the one disk
the other read the data for operating the system etc..

means it is better to have 2 disks, and depending on the data
it can be good to formate the drive containing audio/sample data
with ntfs 64kb or more

if you partition your disk it may only cause laggy situations
especialy with 5400rpms , recommended for Audio is 7200

In example i put large Soundlibrarys like the one of Trilian, Omnisphere
or Ethno on a SSD-External Drive and it works nice, while the internal
harddrive have only to handle system and ableton data

it all depends also on the quickness of the controler of your second harddrive
and the new flashdrives(SSD) should bring nice results with this problems

on the other hand think over the fact that you may want to re-install
one day your OS without loosing some VSTs (AU) Settings etc.... have
all samples you work with on a external drive can make it easy to work
on your projects even when your OS crashed, because your samples at the exact same position
like before the OS-Reinstallment

so far my expierence with this theme
on non Apple-Computers

[Tarekith]

I always run everything off the internal drive, no partitioning anymore.

[martin808]

I'm the same as Tarekith. internal 500g 7200rpm drive. ditched the partitions that i used to always run with. it all seems a bit less complicated this way.

[rikhyray]

I still keep the partitions for the paths sake - which are same since several years and computers (OS,Live,Samples,Music=Songs/DJ collection). Have plenty of ext HDDs for backups and for stuff I dont use so often (and lots of Gb) like VJ clip collection, and any video editing jobs where multi HDDs make a lot of sense. Otherwise ,for all audio work internal drive, recently upgraded to 640 Gb.

[fishmonkey]

partitions can be handy for organisation, but they don't necessarily help performance. the outer tracks read a bit faster, but then forcing the heads to traverse between partitions can actually slow things down a bit.

they can also be rather un-handy when you find that you need to resize them later...

[Pasha]

I always run everything off the internal drive, no partitioning anymore.

+1

[antonlamont45]

Excellent. I feel comfortable from your responses ditching the external. Very nice to have one less thing to carry, one less cable hanging from the laptop.

[Spectrumdisco]

I use a E-SATA Drive running at 7200rpm. No issues at all with my HP Laptop

[chris vine]

So unpartitioning an internal drive is a good idea in terms of performance?

Guess it makes sense........

[KrisM]

I have a 5400RPM 500GB Seagate in my MacBook and it works awesome. As long as you have enough RAM so that the page file/virtual RAM is never accessed, you shouldn't have issues with having the OS and everything else on the same drive.

My desktop, on the other hand, has a few drives, one with the OS and samples, one with the paging file and data (like MP3s, movies, installers, etc), and then audio from when I used it as a DAW. The benefit of having the paging file on a seperate drive is two-fold. One, if it IS ever accessed, it won't affect the system performance (choppiness, laggy as the head snaps back and forth trying to access files needed for the program and swapping). And two, this keeps Windows a lot more tidy if it's allowed to change the paging file's size at whim. If the swap is 2GB, and you install programs beyond it's point on the drive, then Windows needs more, this is added AFTER your programs. Then you install more progams, uninstall one, and then the page file changes size again. Etc and so forth until your drive is a clusterfuck.

But yeah, in your case you can get away with having only one (unpartitioned). Running huge sessions of Live on my 2GB MacBook I still sit at a few hundred MB of RAM free and get no hickups.

[chris vine]

Thanks Kris,

Methinks I am going to unpartition my internal 5400 drive - I recently had some Drive Indicator flashes and dropouts in Live 8 1 3, first time ever.