Komplete 12 External Hard Drive

[johnnyburke]

Hello

I am running Live Suite 9 and have Komplete 9 . I am thinking about getting Komplete 12, which comes with an external hard drive for the sound libraries. Will this improve Live load times for projects with Komplete plugins?

[TLW]

It might well.

Putting sample libraries on a dedicated disk is a good idea in principle because it spreads the work load around more disks.

However, an HDD is never going to be as fast as an SSD, especially in seek times which can be a factor when loading lots of small files.

Personally I’d consider copying the samples off the HDD or download them to an SSD, ideally an internal disk connected to the SATA bus if I were using a PC. On a Mac a Thunderbolt connected SSD or M2 memory would be my ideal preference if cost isn’t an issue.

[johnnyburke]

H i TLW thanks for your reply. I do have a PC, but rather than have an internal SSD installed in my PC, what if I bought an external SSD instead?

[jestermgee]

The drive that comes with K12 is a USB3 HDD but it includes the software installers only (to save downloading everything) as far as I know and not the content specifically. You still need to install it all somewhere. Apparently you can format the drive and use it as normal but you would have to download everything via native access and install but personally i'd invest in an SSD.

[johnnyburke]

Thanks again for your replies.I called Sweetwater recently and was told Komplete 12"comes with an external hard drive", so I am glad I came to this forum with questions! So far, my musician friends have suggested getting an external SSD, such as a Samsung T3 Or T5. If I am upgrading from Komplete 9 to 12, I imagine 500GB will be plenty. Is the performance of an external SSD lacking compared to an internal SSD?

[miyaru]

The speed is determined by the slowest link, in this case USB....... Sata is much faster!

[johnnyburke]

I have 2 USB 3.0 ports- does this make a difference? If not , an internal drive seems to make more sense at this point

[miyaru]

Altough USB3 is fast, Sata is faster, I would go for an internal...... and SSD of course. In my music PC I have two M2 SSD's one for the OS and Software and one for my projects and samples and stuff. I also have a 2TB HDD for backup and storage. This way it works superfast!

[TLW]

Whether a USB 3 SSD would be fast enough depends on how much data is being transferred on and off it at a time. USB 3 is fast, but it doesn’t always reach it’s specified speed. I’ve an external USB drive enclosure for 7,200rpm 3.5” drives which is much slower than my WD, Seagate and Toshiba bus-powered 5,400rpm 2.5” external HDDs. Which is just weird - the 3.5” should be faster than them.

Personally I’d go for an internal SATA SSD, or if that’s not possible Thunderbolt (which is how I connect external SSDs to my Mac). SATA can handle more data than USB and there are other advantages to using the SATA interface. One is that TRIM commands are certain to be applied to the drive, which may or may not be the case with a USB connected one. Another is that it leaves the USB sockets free for other things. And internal drives are less clutter than external ones. You wouldn’t need to be paying for an external drive’s case either, just the bare drive.

[johnnyburke]

thanks for replies- I decided on a Samsung EVO 970. The question now- should I leave the OS on the original HDD and put Ableton and Komplete on the SSD?

[jestermgee]

It all really comes down to what you will load and where you want to make improvements.

In this day and age, having your OS on an SSD is almost a requirement if you want to keep things running fast and responsive. A mechanical HDD for the OS will cause everything to run slow mainly because of read speed, fragmentation and the memory page file.

Having your full content library on SSD is nice, but not always practical given the stupid size of things like Komplete but the cost of SSD is far less now than 10 years ago when I first started upgrading all my systems. Additionally, it will only really benefit the use of instruments that have large sample libraries such as Session Strings or some of the large detailed drum kits like Abbey Road that need to load GB of sample data into memory. Some instruments like Omnisphere for instance can have 100GB library but also have 8000+ presets so each preset may only need 100MB of samples loaded into memory which you won't see a huge improvement with unless you open projects that have a lot of instances.

I'm not about to recommend for you to swap out your OS drive for an SSD because I do not know your level of experience in that area and unless you want to completely format and reinstall everything, you would need a good clone software like Acronis to clone your HDD to a new SSD. For instance my system before I had an SSD for the OS drive caused Live to take almost 2 minutes to load (on windows 7) which went down to about 30 seconds with a cloned SSD. That was enough for me to decide on SSD for almost everything as I could afford to and now I have 4 internal SSD drives dedicated to VST libraries and samples, another one for my OS and another for some of my larger and more commonly used games. I also have a 6TB Ironwolf 7200rpm server drive for the additional stuff. It's painful to switch to a PC where it's just a HDD now.

[miyaru]

+1 For the OS drive should be SSD!!! As told before SSD's are dead cheap, and makes life a little nicer and Live much faster........

For a "normal PC" it ain't to difficult to swap an HDD for a SSD, and connecting another one too. If your not skilled to do it, let someone do it for you. Altough cloning is convient, I mostly do full new system setups, whereby good preperation is a pre. This means making an inventory of what you have, what you want to keep etc. Before you swap de-activate software that needs that of course. If you are good prepared it will still take several hours, but then you have a nice clean working OS again. If on Windows: make sure you go the 10Pro way, as this gives more room for tweaks and stuff.

Good luck, and have fun later on with a much faster system.......