Ableton Forum

My wish is to keep my older laptop as clean as possible, so it can run ableton smoothly. Is this a great option?

Laptop SSD:

Ableton Live installation

External SSD (USB):

All VSTS (NI Komplete, Diva, pretty heavy stuff)
All samplepacks
Ableton projects

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I'm using midicontrollers, but don't care too much about latency.

Any thoughts?

In my wildest dreams, I install everything (including Live itself) on an external SSD. But I guess this will never work.

Anyone with a solution on the 'most economical way' of installing Live?

Simply put, I want as less as possible on my laptop HD, to prevent it to become sluggish.

You didn't mention whether you were on Windows or OS X.

I'm running Windows and have all of my Ableton library & factory packs and NI content on a second hard drive. On my system, I have a 500 GB SSD as my boot C: drive. Then I have two mirrored 4 TB HDD as my D: drive. To keep from filling my SSD with a bunch of sample libraries, I've moved them and their paths to the D: drive as follows:
Move the contents of C:\Users\yourusername\Documents\Ableton\Factory Packs\ to D:\Redirected\Users\yourusername\Documents\Ableton\Factory Packs\
Create a junction point linking C:\Users\yourusername\Documents\Ableton\Factory Packs\ to D:\Redirected\Users\yourusername\Documents\Ableton\Factory Packs\
Move the contents of C:\Users\yourusername\Documents\Ableton\Library\ to D:\Redirected\Users\yourusername\Documents\Ableton\Library\
Create a junction point linking C:\Users\yourusername\Documents\Ableton\Library\ to D:\Redirected\Users\yourusername\Documents\Ableton\Library\
For NI content and patches for some other VST:
Move the contents of C:\Users\Public\Documents\ to D:\Redirected\Users\Public\Documents\
Create a junction point linking C:\Users\Public\Documents\ to D:\Redirected\Users\Public\Documents\

In my case, I've moved 432 GB from my SSD to the cheaper hard drives. The beauty of using junction points is that it allows all of the content and updates to be installed to their default locations because it appears in all the default paths to the applications. "mklink" is the command line tool in windows you need to use to create the junction points. And you'll want your second drive to be formatted as NTFS.

In your setup, I'd be concerned about the external drive not always being connected. I have no idea how that will impact Ableton's content caching.

Thanks for the extensive explaining, really appreciated

I will be on Windows, but if this method works great on a mac, then I will try it on my 2009 macbook as well.