Hello everyone,

I spoke with Murray at PASIC about this, and I've forgotten a couple of steps to take.  I have 2 hard drives, 250gb and 500gb and would like to store my libraries in the second hard drive.  The question is what steps do I need to take after the moving to the secondary hard drive to make sure the playback happens correctly.  Thanks for you help.

For VDL, you can keep the Kontakt Player application itself on your main drive, but move the VDL Library folder to your second drive if you'd like. Once you've done this, you'll just need to reset the ";path to library"; field in the library ";options"; box so Kontakt Player knows where to look for the new library location.

If you're using other Kontakt formatted libraries, you may find it helpful to read up on the Database function within Kontakt 2. Essentially once you've moved instruments and samples around, it's a good idea to do a rebuild of Kontakt's database which will allow for quicker searching and location of your sounds within Kontakt.

Thanks for the help Jim. 

I'm curious, how does that effect playback and performance?  Any problems?  Any improvements?

So far it's hard to tell anything.  My first hard drive still has a large amount of unused space, and I have a good amount of RAM (4gb).  I guess in the long run it will allow for more storage of instruments, multi's, etc...  I also believe that since the programs are coming from Hard Drive 1 and the Libraries from Hard Drive 2, in the long run, it will free up load time, playback time, etc... and allow more storage. 

VDL is what's called a ";streaming library."; What this means is that a lot of the sample data (recordings) used to make its sounds are required to be ";streamed"; from the hard drive. This is why the DFD function is important to understand. If it weren't for disk streaming, samples would have to be loaded entirely to RAM, which would be essentially impossible given the size and variety of so many of VDL's instruments. There's some extra explanation about some of this at:
https://www.tapspace.com/forums/index.php?topic=636.0

Disk streaming requires a fast drive on a fast bus. Given that your ";main"; hard drive is being used for other things, some feel it is helpful to have libraries stored on a secondary drive so as that drive is being tasked with accessing samples quickly, anything else that might be going on with your system won't interfere with it. People who record to audio a lot, often like to use a third drive where audio is written to. It's mainly a matter of streamlining so you don't oftertax your system.

This setup won't be any sort of substitute for a fast CPU, and a healthy stock of RAM. But it can definitely give performance gains when all your other ducks are in a row. If you do decide to use this method, it'd ideal for the secondary drive to be internal, and at least a 7200RPM drive. Doing this with a slow drive, or via USB (for example) may not really be worth it.

To echo Jim's comments, you won't notice much difference if you're simply playing back a library -- whatever drive it's stored on will function as fast as said drive will.

If you're reading and also writing to one same drive, you'll see a big difference.

Let's just remember the old axiom; computers are only as fast as the slowest part in use.  If you use a slow drive, that's your bottleneck.  If you use a fast drive, but also do more than one thing, it splits time, and there's that bottleneck again.

Your mileage will vary; it depends entirely on your hardware.

[quote author=drumcat link=topic=2102.msg10818#msg10818 date=1195619231]

Let's just remember the old axiom; computers are only as fast as the slowest part in use.�� If you use a slow drive, that's your bottleneck.�� [b]If you use a fast drive, but also do more than one thing, it splits time, and there's that bottleneck again.
[/b][/quote]

I need some clarification.. :) For some reason I am under the impression that Raid0 is the speed king as far as the hard drive thing goes. But are you suggesting that if the bandwidth to the harddrives is split up that you won't acctually see as much of a performance increase? Or does this depend on your bus/proccesor speed being greater than your HD rpm speed?�� (god I hope that made sense....)

[quote author=perpetualpoet link=topic=2102.msg10823#msg10823 date=1195662167]
I need some clarification.. :) For some reason I am under the impression that Raid0 is the speed king as far as the hard drive thing goes. But are you suggesting that if the bandwidth to the harddrives is split up that you won't acctually see as much of a performance increase? Or does this depend on your bus/proccesor speed being greater than your HD rpm speed?  (god I hope that made sense....)
[/quote]

Raid0 is my friend.  Let's look at it another way...  Say with a 7200rpm you're getting roughly 8M/sec.  You write something at 3M/sec, and your drive has to go back and forth between reading in one spot and writing in another.  If it's an audio export, no problem.  If you're recording something real-time, that can present problems.

With my Raid0, I get about 22M/sec, and whether I read or write, it's going to the optimal one of 5 drives.  I put in server drives (if you check, most hard drives come in consumer and server levels, with the difference being the bearing/guts quality) and smaller ones to save money.  5 320's gave me a good set of 1.5TB acting like one drive.  In my case, I use just one ";drive";, since the mobo is doing the hardware optimization.  If I'm just doing one thing, it'll get up to 32M/sec, and is typically faster reading than writing.  Also, I have an external USB2 1tb drive, but that is strictly a data backup device.  Raid arrays are statistically more likely to fail.

Anyhow, the rules are a bit different for Raid.  2 drives will get you 1.5, 5 drives about 2.7 to one.  There's also Raid5, but it's slower, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you have no backup drive.  The reason I went with as many drives as I could cram in there, even though it's diminished returns is because it's actually cheaper that way.  But no matter how you skin that cat, you have everything on that superfast drive, because even if you're reading and writing 100% at once, it's still faster than one 7200rpm drive dedicated to reading and a separate dedicated to writing.

To answer your question specifically, ";if the bandwidth to the harddrives is split up that you won't acctually see as much of a performance increase?";, if you have a raid card or on-board support for raid, the ";bandwidth"; is no issue.  The bus between the drives is wider than any data you'll send its way.  To be sure, it's not the pipe for hard drives.  Magnetic drives are the slowest device in a computer.  That's why these new Solid State Drives look so interesting.  No spinning platters or physical motion.  They're like huge ram-drives, and are multiples faster than magnetic.

By about mid- to late-2009, some of those drives will be reasonable and with capacities in the 1/4tb range.  When they are, you can put all of your samples on those, and DFD will be a relic in some ways.

I always keep my documents, projects, samples, etc. on a separate drive or partition.  That way I don't lose anything if Windows takes a dive.  At worst I'll have to reinstall my programs, but my vitals remain intact.

1