Worth running Live Sets from external hard drives...

[benjamingordon]

Hi all...

Im on a macbookpro dual 2.4GHz, 4GB Ram, 5400RPM Harddrive internal. I have 1100 clips of audio in my session and its a very large 4GB+ set.

Im always scared im putting a lot of pressure on the machine and i can feel it choking sometimes, making me scared to do bold things incase of crashes...

Is it worth running the live set from an external drive with 7200 RPM on firwire 800 or something?

Cheers, Benji

[gjm]

What do you mean by you 'feel' its choking? Does the Hard Disk overload indicator (top right of Lives UI) blink at you and are you actually loosing audio?

Its a common strategy to run sets from ext drives, but equally you will find users running sets from their system drives as well. Do you already have an ext FW800 drive? If so, do a practice run with your set and see if you 'feel' the same. If not, some owners of MBP's have upgraded their 5400 drives to 7200 system drives. This could be a nice little upgrade for you and solve your concern while not having to lug another piece of kit around.

[davepermen]

a 4GB+ set is not huge. my work is currently reaching an 80GB+ set... and the amount of diskspace doesn't change at all the behavior of live, as it just means it has to read from a bit different places.

if it's choking, an external disk won't help, as they're only slower mostly anyways. if it's the disk, maybe an ssd would help, else, it's somewhere else where you get the problem.

[Tytus]

yes it is worth it.

you have a MBP so get a esata cardbus adapter and an external hd enclosure(make sure it has e-sata...plenty do). This will let you use any standard sata HD yet still maintain the speeds of an internal drive.

[sanfoin]

Yes, it is definitely worth it. Ableton recommends it too, if I'm not mistaken.

Not sure that an enclosure is the best way to go. That kind of drive is not necessary at any rate. I use a one piece Cavalry USB hard drive to store my Live library, all loops and samples, as well as saved projects. You may also want to save projects on a second internal hard drive, if that's an option, just for safer keeping. If an external hard drive fails, there's no guarantee that the data can be recovered.

[benjamingordon]

cool...

any suggestions on external hard drives that can withstand some travelling and club environments...

would solid state drives work better?

:

[baseimpulse]

SSD are worth it totally!!!!!! u can drop an SSD ( not recomending you do this ) and it will survive, if you do an SATA drive... your totally S.O.L and SSD will withstand mad punishment!!!

[davepermen]

with a big enough ssd for your data and all, you don't need external storage anymore. ssd's are fast enough (espencially their low latency for random accesses help tremendously) to not have to care about the hdd bottlenecks anymore.

just realize that an intel gen2 ssd (i have the gen1 myself) has a random read latency of 0.065ms, compared to the ordinary laptop hdd having 12ms or so. that means it's about 180x faster reaching to your data. so any latency issues resulting in dropouts should be fixed.

i have a 12" laptop, and a 160gb intel gen1 ssd in it. it performs awesome for anything, even while the processor isn't that fast (1.8ghz c2d).

[zalo]

there is a video somewhere that talks about how prodigy switched all of their computers to SSD based solely on the amount of vibration caused from their monitors

SSD seems to have a lot of benefits at the cost of price and size

looks like your going to need to do some soul searching now

also, there are articles about MBP4.1s with 6gbs of ram, im pretty sure ableton maxes out at 4gb of ram usage but snow leopard can use more so you might be able to use the extra free ram space since background processes could be moved to the extra 2gbs of space

kind of a controversial issue in the mac world, not everyone believes it works but its something to look into

[davepermen]

interesting to hear this is sorta controversial in the macworld. in the windows world, this is wellknown. if you're on a 64bit os, then the os can use as much ram as it wants, and any 32bit app can use up to 4gb (it it can handle that without crash. some apps are shocked about the amount of free ram and crash games mostly happen to crash at the 2gb limit).

i would be shocked if it doesn't work the same on mac osx...

but yeah, i can understand prodigy to move to ssds. cost is quite small compared to other stuff (heck, ableton live cost me quite a bit more than the 160gb intel ssd, and it's known to be one of the best out there). so if you look at stuff like cdjs that cost up to 3000$, a lemure around 2000$, a macbook or laptop at quite some price, and software investments of up to 1000$ (or more), suddenly, paying like 500$ for an ssd is not much money spent, and it's so awesome ****ing well spent, i can only repeat it: it's the best thing i've ever bought for all my pc's, ever.

[zalo]

interesting to hear this is sorta controversial in the macworld.

all the sales information for pre unibody MBPs say they capped out at 4gb, people started putting in more ram to see if it would work, but this was mostly for VMs that they were dividing their processor and memory for anyway

now with snow leopard and the expanded memory allowance, not sure if its only for the 64bit mode (for me this takes a force boot and my RME drivers dont work), possibilities might exist for the MBP to use all of it inside osx solely

again, something to read up on

[sanfoin]

For a pretty in-depth (if slightly excessive) exploration into the techniques and mechanics of digital backup...

http://blog.iso50.com/2009/09/21/backing-it-up/

...from an electronic musician who is also a graphic designer. Should be interesting and relevant to all concerned.

[davepermen]

interesting to hear this is sorta controversial in the macworld.

all the sales information for pre unibody MBPs say they capped out at 4gb, people started putting in more ram to see if it would work, but this was mostly for VMs that they were dividing their processor and memory for anyway

now with snow leopard and the expanded memory allowance, not sure if its only for the 64bit mode (for me this takes a force boot and my RME drivers dont work), possibilities might exist for the MBP to use all of it inside osx solely

again, something to read up on

well, if it worked from the start for VMs, then it works for any app. VMs are just apps for the os. so if you could put in 6gb ram, and use 4 for osx, and 2 for windows running at the same time, then it just works for ableton, too. if not, it's a bug of the os, and a strange one..

[davepermen]

For a pretty in-depth (if slightly excessive) exploration into the techniques and mechanics of digital backup...

http://blog.iso50.com/2009/09/21/backing-it-up/

...from an electronic musician who is also a graphic designer. Should be interesting and relevant to all concerned.

nice to linking it. yeah, backups are the holy grail for having a great non-stressfull live (in any kind of backup one could mean). i have for my backups a windows home server (i use windows only personally), and it's awesome, doing automatic backups and filesharing, so that the individual pc or laptop at home here is completely unimportant. if my laptop gets stolen or fails in some way, just get a new one, restore, continue like before.

the other backup is the live-backup, means when you're playing on stage, and the laptop fails, do you have some fallback solution, like playing a cd, or what ever..

for any non-apple user, i can only suggest windows home server, it's the nonplusultra NAS++, nothing else comes close (seen enough halfbacken solutions).

for apple users, well, i think it's called time machine? or time capsule, that's the external one.

[benjamingordon]

How about these?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ex-Pro-ExpressC ... 609&sr=1-1