Using Live with an external drive

rbro · Post by **rbro** » Sun Jul 23, 2006 11:00 pm

I currently have a 250GB firewire drive in addition to my internal PB G4 80GB drive. The Live app as well as most of my loops and samples lives on the external drive, whereas the Live "Library" still lives on the internal drive. For space considerations, I'd like to move everything to the external drive. Is it ok to do this? Can I just move the library to the external drive and set that somewhere in the live prefs? Are there other files that get deposited somewhere on the internal drive, like temp files etc? Any way to have those automatically stored on the external drive as well? I'm constantly running out of space on the internal drive and every time I run Live, it seems like I lose more space. And finally, does it make sense to install another instance of OS X on the external drive and just boot from there?

gaspode · Post by **gaspode** » Sun Jul 23, 2006 11:06 pm

Yes you can move the live library by changing prefs... there is a library pref that you can set to place this live library in any directory... just point to the new location....

rbro · Post by **rbro** » Mon Jul 24, 2006 12:52 am

gaspode wrote:Yes you can move the live library by changing prefs... there is a library pref that you can set to place this live library in any directory... just point to the new location....

OK, I've moved this as well as the "Live recordings" folder that were in my internal drive and I've freed up almost 8GB! Now, is there any advantage to installing OS X on the external drive and booting from that as well?

muthafunka · Post by **muthafunka** » Mon Jul 24, 2006 2:10 am

Not that I know of. Conventional wisdom says have your app in the apps folder on your internal and your samples etc on the external, that way the discs are reading from as few places as possible simultaneously.

rbro · Post by **rbro** » Mon Jul 24, 2006 2:20 am

muthafunka wrote:Not that I know of. Conventional wisdom says have your app in the apps folder on your internal and your samples etc on the external, that way the discs are reading from as few places as possible simultaneously.

Well if that were true, then it would make more sense to have the app AND the samples on the same disk, no?

stringtapper · Post by **stringtapper** » Mon Jul 24, 2006 2:45 am

rbro wrote:
muthafunka wrote:Not that I know of. Conventional wisdom says have your app in the apps folder on your internal and your samples etc on the external, that way the discs are reading from as few places as possible simultaneously.
Well if that were true, then it would make more sense to have the app AND the samples on the same disk, no?

No. If you have the app and the library on one disc, then that disc is reading from two different places. Splitting the app and library between two discs makes it so that each disc is performing only one duty at a time.

gaspode · Post by **gaspode** » Mon Jul 24, 2006 12:43 pm

App/OS disk reads should be a lot smaller than sample reads...

You should consider a balance between performance (high speed disk reads on a 7200+ ext disk), and disk usage.

Also, you should be able to use your system without requiring an external disk. What exactly are you trying to accomplish by putting the os/app on an external disk? I doubt your system/apps would boot *that* much faster by being on an external disk. Likewise I doubt you'll see system/app performance being any faster on an external disk.

Anyway, good luck on what you figure out what to do.

stringtapper · Post by **stringtapper** » Mon Jul 24, 2006 5:30 pm

You definitely want the app on the internal drive with the OS and the library on an external.

If you're doing live recording and looping and you want to get even more efficient add a second external and set that as the audio recording destination.