Ableton Forum

What size drive do you think would keep me out of trouble? 128gb? 256?
For starters, I understand that buying big made sense with a moveable drive, as the inner sectors would have faster access rates than the outer ones. And therefore my habit was to use my drives to half capacity before repurposing them. I just discovered that the Samsung 240 pro offers a class of performance over its smaller capacity counterpart, so that might be the deciding factor right there. I'm really running a skeleton crew on my macbook pro-some apps for administrative purposes, and not a downloading maniac. I've got 56gb on there now-system folder and home folder for 2 accounts. Just my ableton along with some select production tools, my home folder where I'm keeping all my working projects. I haven't even decided if by routine I will be collecting all for those project folders. Which leads to my follow up question:
If you said at least 256gb how are you dividing your labor between external drives, second internal drives, and the like?
In OSX can you put a home folder on a separate drive than the system install, or is that asking for trouble?
I have a few choices to make:
a) System and applications folder on drive one. Maybe Ableton Library. Home folder if need be. Otherwise
b) Project folder in Home folder or separate folder, and abe Library, on SSD with optical drive replacement kit
c) iTunes media on an external drive. Maybe Thunderbolt, but I'll hold onto my drive for awhile
d) SD card slot for recording my gigs AND/OR for simply having the current live set copied and backed up at the gig.

However you advise, I'd still probably get that second drive, maybe 9 months later, and use it as a back-up, either with time machine, a RAID 0, or just a cloned drive. Therefore staying a step ahead of a failed drive. If you think dividing media files in Live from the Application and project files is really more agony than a performance boost, I'll probably collect all and save, and keep everything on the same drive. My problem with that is the nagging thought that my memory will eat up that much faster knowing that the same samples and the like have now been moved to multiple locations. (It's like saving your instagram pictures to your camera roll on your phone-not that I'm on instagram).

Any thoughts?

fishmonkey wrote:totally worth it for the speed increase, however don't believe the hype that SSDs are naturally more robust because they have no moving parts.

having no moving parts, they are probably more robust to physical shocks, however in other ways they are more delicate than a good hard drive.

the scary thing about SSDs is when they malfunction, they tend to just fail suddenly and silently, with no warning.

yes... i've lost 2 in the last 18 months that just died.... make sure you back em up regularly

Anyone used this Hybrid drive?? Interested to know if it's a gimmic or a good combination:

http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/internal-h ... rid-drive/

Captain Johnson wrote:Anyone used this Hybrid drive?? Interested to know if it's a gimmic or a good combination:

http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/internal-h ... rid-drive/

I've used the Seagate 500GB and the 750GB model both 5400 RPM in an i3 Win 8 laptop. They are really good at Boot Speed / Program Start up.
Overall better than a regular hard drive. I just wished they were 7200 RPM drives.
Live 9 hated these drives. Live 9 choked on program startup / indexing / just using Live 9.
I had to get a new i7 laptop with an SSD before I could really use Live 9.
So if you are looking for something that will run Live 9 better then I'd stick with a plain 7200 RPM drive. Or, obviously, an SSD.

Captain Johnson wrote:Anyone used this Hybrid drive?? Interested to know if it's a gimmic or a good combination:

http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/internal-h ... rid-drive/

I vouched for my 1tb hybrid just recently. Did you miss that? Live 9 works really well and starts up ca 30 plug-ins in about 8 seconds on my Macbook Pro with OS X 10.6.8. Zero issues. The stats say about 40% faster read and writes, but I experience it as way faster when load times are concerned. My bottleneck is CPU.

granted wrote:

Captain Johnson wrote:Anyone used this Hybrid drive?? Interested to know if it's a gimmic or a good combination:

http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/internal-h ... rid-drive/

I've used the Seagate 500GB and the 750GB model both 5400 RPM in an i3 Win 8 laptop. They are really good at Boot Speed / Program Start up.
Overall better than a regular hard drive. I just wished they were 7200 RPM drives.
Live 9 hated these drives. Live 9 choked on program startup / indexing / just using Live 9.
I had to get a new i7 laptop with an SSD before I could really use Live 9.
So if you are looking for something that will run Live 9 better then I'd stick with a plain 7200 RPM drive. Or, obviously, an SSD.

Thanks for the feedback. I've got a 7200 RPM WD at the moment but considering upgrading.

mikb wrote:

Captain Johnson wrote:Anyone used this Hybrid drive?? Interested to know if it's a gimmic or a good combination:

http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/internal-h ... rid-drive/

I vouched for mine just recently. Did you miss that? Live 9 works really well and starts up ca 30 plug-ins in about 8 seconds on my Macbook Pro with OS X 10.6.8. Zero issues. The stats say about 40% faster read and writes, but I experience it as way faster when load times are concerned. My bottleneck is CPU.

Yeah I missed your blurb! I'm still running L8 on MacBook Pro C2D 2.2 4GB ram OS X 10.6.8 with Western Digital 7200 HDD. Everything works great but am considering the whole upgrade thing. It'll cost but wondering if its worth it, seeing these drives made me think it might be ok to run L9 on my current laptop or just make L8 a beast

Captain Johnson wrote:I'm still running L8 on MacBook Pro C2D 2.2 4GB ram OS X 10.6.8 with Western Digital 7200 HDD. Everything works great but am considering the whole upgrade thing. It'll cost but wondering if its worth it, seeing these drives made me think it might be ok to run L9 on my current laptop or just make L8 a beast

Well, my old disc was a Samsung 5400rpm 215GB so you'll probably see less of a speed increase. I have 6gb RAM in mine (4 + 2), which should be your first priority I think. I got memory and disk from Macsales for about $250-300. Unless you plan a new machine, I feel this is reasonable for a hardware investment in order to stay producing.

I don't find Ableton 9 more demanding than 8, but I guess that depends on what you use and how you use it.

Anyone using this old hardware should realize and learn to live with the limitations. Before the new disk I could run 16 tracks with reverb (See the performance test thread somewhere for that particular test) before crackles appeared.

I haven't redone that test yet, but don't expect an improvement there as it is mostly the CPU that is tested. But I do find my machine went from "barely usable" to "usable" (with Live) with the bigger faster disk.

Next hardware update will be a newer Macbook Pro though. I'm fond of the 15"-models. Maybe a 2010?

mikb wrote:

Captain Johnson wrote:I'm still running L8 on MacBook Pro C2D 2.2 4GB ram OS X 10.6.8 with Western Digital 7200 HDD. Everything works great but am considering the whole upgrade thing. It'll cost but wondering if its worth it, seeing these drives made me think it might be ok to run L9 on my current laptop or just make L8 a beast

Well, my old disc was a Samsung 5400rpm 215GB so you'll probably see less of a speed increase. I have 6gb RAM in mine (4 + 2), which should be your first priority I think. I got memory and disk from Macsales for about $250-300. Unless you plan a new machine, I feel this is reasonable for a hardware investment in order to stay producing.

I don't find Ableton 9 more demanding than 8, but I guess that depends on what you use and how you use it.

Anyone using this old hardware should realize and learn to live with the limitations. Before the new disk I could run 16 tracks with reverb (See the performance test thread somewhere for that particular test) before crackles appeared.

I haven't redone that test yet, but don't expect an improvement there as it is mostly the CPU that is tested. But I do find my machine went from "barely usable" to "usable" (with Live) with the bigger faster disk.

Next hardware update will be a newer Macbook Pro though. I'm fond of the 15"-models. Maybe a 2010?

Indeed the 2010 models are a very neat
What system you using now then? Could I run L9 on my current set up you think?
To be honest I only use my MBPro for gigs an my iMac (circa 2008) for production! That's only got 4GB ram too! Maybe a 6GB upgrade is needed there!

Captain Johnson wrote: Indeed the 2010 models are a very neat
What system you using now then? Could I run L9 on my current set up you think?
To be honest I only use my MBPro for gigs an my iMac (circa 2008) for production! That's only got 4GB ram too! Maybe a 6GB upgrade is needed there!

Macbook Pro 2.2 Core2Duo of 2007. Most likely the same as yours.

It's my experience that maximum RAM at 6gb and a really fast disk makes it operating at optimum speed. While the SSD advantage is small at 8GB of adaptive disk space with these Hybrid disks I'd say it's still noticable at a fraction of the price.

You could use L9 as much as L8 on the optimized 2007 Macbook Pro as far as I'm concerned, but some stuff is really different and a few work less well (like external sync, but that didn't work very well in L8 either). I bought L8 and got L9 for free and I never opened L8 since that first period, which is a hint.

Interesting! Hmmmm, I suppose it wouldn't hurt just upgrading the ram an disk seeing how that went!

Thanks for the information

With all that praise for hybrid HD I should also mention I've started to plan around a new G5 Tower rebuild for next year. I want to go all SSD or possibly PCIe-Flash with that project as the objectives are maximum speed and music workability. I'm excited to follow reports from you guys that try SSD and the results you get. Keep them coming.

IMO it's a waste of time and money rebuilding a G5 Tower, which uses the old PowerPC architecture. you'd be much better off getting an Intel Mac Pro.

I don't think this was mentioned in the thread, but what about an external SSD hooked up to a MBP 2011, which I think has 2.0 USB ports, and I know a 5400rpm drive for sure. I'd have Live and samples on there, thanks.

alexfsu wrote:I don't think this was mentioned in the thread, but what about an external SSD hooked up to a MBP 2011, which I think has 2.0 USB ports, and I know a 5400rpm drive for sure. I'd have Live and samples on there, thanks.

Thats a HUGE bottleneck on the SSD. USB2 is going to slow that SSD to a crawl.

This is a great comparison to let you know the difference between stated speeds and possible real world speeds:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA ... ther_buses

The 2011 has an internal SATA 1 or 2 bus.
Compared to USB2's 60mbs even SATA 1 at 150mbs is worth it.
eSATA will plug right in to the internal bus via the expansion slot on the macbook pro!
Basically if you're going to use an SSD with a 2011 macbook pro look around for an eSATA card and get an eSATA+ USB3 enclosure.
That way you're ready for when you get a new laptop, (very likely without an expansion card slot), and you're getting the most out of the SSD right now.