Ableton Forum

Hey, guys. Is the external Hard Drive a better place to keep the live's library to avoid the orange D button flashing?
Thank you for your advice.

That depends on the external hard drive. You might choose from USB,USB2.0,Firewire400 or 800, eSATA 150 or 300. eSATA is definetly the fastest solution. An eSATA drive will operate at the same speed as an internal SATA drive and will provide the most reliable read AND write speed. From my own tests with USB 2.0 vs Firewire 400 I've found that USB 2.0 is about 50% slower on the write than the read, which might hurt you if you are recording or rendering or freezing... Firewire is more robust and does not suffer from the DMA troubles (results it delays/interuptions) that USB does and seems more consistent between the read and write speeds. That's the interfaces. The choice of hard drive will mater as well. Drive speed, interface type, buffer size, seek time... These will all play a part as well. Then too, if you are using a USB audio interface and plugging in a USB external hard drive to the same USB card, they will fight for bandwidth.... Firewire has higher bandwidth so it would be better suited to handle this config. So, it depends some on your own unique configuration.....

Thank you. i do have a fast Firewire Drive.
The question is: is it more efficient to keep the Live's library on that drive of on the computers drive?

Since no one answered your question, I'd say yes - if you need more HD space. The only setback is you're stuck with lugging that HD to every gig. I have no need for the huge sound library......so I'd like the option of running Live without the library since I don't use it.

Yep, definetely better to put it on the external hard drive. If you have it on the computers hard drive, it makes the needle that reads the drive skip around much more, since it is already doing a lot of work with software, operating systems etc.

Pro Tools suggests that you should always keep all the audio on an external hard drive for example.