Ableton Forum

Since I just went through the installing"ceremonies" on my new Vaio, I am not so keen to repeat it with replacement drive and not experienced enough to know how to copy 1:1 entire drive content to a new one ( I do have 2,5 external case so theoretically it could be done, is it possible ? All partitions with OSs ?)
I have also 7200 external FW HD but it gave few hiccups , I mean once in few hundred hours but it makes me very sceptical, enough not to risk using external drive in live Live situation. How far can 4200 go ?how many tracks ? I suppose there people who still use 4200 HD and it works.

Well I got 22 tracks on my Sony Vaio S260's internal drive. 23 tracks made the Disk Meter light up and hiccups started to occur.

I was able to get 39 tracks on my HP Pavilion ZD7000 notebook which has a 5400 rpm drive. That's almost double the tracks!

Makes one think.

4200 will get you far, but here's another tip for performance without an actual hardware upgrade,

since live streams audio direct from disk... you can lighten the load of streaming data from the hd by loading clips into RAM. The most effecient way would be to load your smallest clips into RAM first. as they have the same effect on disc effeciency as larger clips do, but a very minimal effect on using all of your ram.

Also, clips that reference the same audio file take up very little RAM when loaded into RAM. The audio file itself is loaded into RAM only once, and by loading all the clips that reference that file into RAM, you are only loading those extra .asd's (about 10k-30k each) into RAM, rather than the same audio file repeatedly. In other words, if you load a clip into RAM that references the same audio file as another clip - go ahead and load the other clip into ram as well since the clip itself isn't loaded twice.

AdamJay wrote:Also, clips that reference the same audio file take up very little RAM when loaded into RAM. The audio file itself is loaded into RAM only once, and by loading all the clips that reference that file into RAM, you are only loading those extra .asd's (about 10k-30k each) into RAM, rather than the same audio file repeatedly. In other words, if you load a clip into RAM that references the same audio file as another clip - go ahead and load the other clip into ram as well since the clip itself isn't loaded twice.

Are you positive about this? i asked this very question to the abe's once and they told me only the looped part of a large clip was loaded into RAM