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Hi

I recently purchased a VST plugin Galaxy ll and Vintage D the requirements suggested i install the the plugin on to a fast Hard Drive as the pianos will be streamed directly from the HD. I checked my Macbook 5.1 specs and the HD was only 5400 rpm, i then went to the store and bought the WD My Book Essential External Hard Drive 7200rpm 1TB. Prior to doing no research on this new external Drive i was wondering if anyone could add any comments as to wether it will serve me justice, assuming others may have one ?

Thanks.

It'll do you fine.
Actually the plugin is installed on your system drive, it's the library (the piano sounds) that will be installed on your new faster drive.

I would have preferred to replace the internal drive, and not require an external one.
But the external drive should work fine.

How does it connect to the laptop? USB?

Thats got me very confused now, which Drive should i be installing the plugin on ? I assumed the External Drive as this is the fast HD where the samples will be streamed from. For if the plugin is installed on the system Drive, How then can the samples come from the new fast Drive ?

New Generation USB 3.0 + USB 2.0.

The internal disk will be faster than any external disk. The USB interface will be the bottleneck, the overhead of the USB connection will be far greater than the difference between the 5400 rpm vs 7200 rpm. And the rotation speed is only one of many factor of the disk performance, don't worry about it, unless it is proven that the disk speed is a problem(then you should do de-fragmentation to make it faster first, before seeking replacement).

The external disk is for extended storage space, intended for storing large, occasionally used files, like movies or MP3 etc, and back up purpose. There is no performance benefit to use an external disk.

Hope this helps.

Vintage D is not quite as demanding as some other virtual pianos, but in general do not put the sample library on a system disc, i.e. if you use a laptop Mac booting off an internal drive, then put the samples on an external drive if you have no other internal drive. Put the plug-in/standalone player app on the system drive if you only have two drives. However, a USB 2.0 interface is not good for external drives. Firewire is much better, even firewire 400 is better than USB 2.0 for sample streaming, but you should use firewire 800 (or better Thunderbolt on a new Mac). So I would never recommend the WD HD USB drive for this application.

On a modern computer, little of this matters. Unless you're mixing multiple tracks, most any modern computer can handle piano libraries. (Some people have even been successful with netbooks, the snails of the computing world.)

Some people have had success with 5400 RPM drives, though I wouldn't buy a new 5400 RPM when upgrading. I'd use 7200 RPM.

Some people have success using an external USB drive. I would rather use an internal for this. The external would be fine for mass storage of mixes, rather than for libraries. But since the OP has already purchased the external, he can give it a try (and let us know how it turns out).

Corporate IT used to make 2 drives for everyone, nothing to do with performance, but maintenance: C: for system and programs, D: for data. They usually only back up D:, not C:. When you got a virus or something, they can quickly restore the system and programs (from an image) and your data is still there, when you lost your data for some reason, they can just restore the data from a backup. You still have only one physical drive, but they make 2 logical drives out of it.
It was a good idea but didn't consider human nature, people still put data on C: anyways, then end up C: is quickly full and D: is hardly used. I don't know anyone is still doing that today.
We still separate data from programs, but instead of putting them on different drive(partitions), we put them under different folders.

The music industry may have it's own conventions that I am not aware of, but I would be surprised if it has anything to do with performance.

And like the piano world, a lot of numbers and buzz words for computer equipments are more of marketing spins than actual indications of quality and performance of a device. For most practical purpose, you would not notice the difference between a 5400 rpm drive and a 7200 rpm drive, and a 7200 drive does not necessarily out perform a 5400 drive. The rotation speed is just one of many factors, the actual speed will be determined by the weakest link of the entire system. And the 7200 drive tend to be (a lot) nosier.

As posters pointed out, a recent day computer is sufficient for many demanding tasks (I have no experience with Vintage D, so I can't speak for that). However, if you are seeking the extreme, you might try a computer with SSD (solid state drive), solid state drive is fast and quiet, so it will be smooth and makes less back ground noise to your beautiful music. However, an external SSD is unlikely to gain you any performance benefit (other than quietness), since the drive read speed is unlikely to be the weakest link.

Cheers

FWIW, as someone that does have experience with Vintage D, Ivory II, EWQL Piano's, etc. and has the latest, fastest Mac Pro, an iMac, Mac Mini, and Macbook Pro, and writes custom MIDI/Audio software for the Mac, I have some practical knowledge about it. I will stand behind what I've said above, and I have seen the "Slow Disk" message depending on the type of drive used and the type of interface used, especially using the more disk intensive pianos like Ivory II, or worse EWQL. There are a number of factors at play here and so it depends on the piano, how you are using the pianos, and what other tasks may be going on. The Vintage D is one of the least demanding pianos. In general access time is the most important variable, and you can't beat an SSD for that. But you can get along fine without an expensive (for multiple large libraries) SSD so I didn't mention that above.

But if you don't care to take my advice, here is what the Ivory II manual has to say about disks (which I would agree with):

For desktop computers, try to use a dedicated internal non-system hard drive (usually SATA).

For laptops with a single internal 5400 RPM drive, use an external drive.

Use Striped RAID (RAID 0) technology, or even better, a Solid State Drive (SSD) if possible.

When using an external hard drive interface, choose from the following interfaces in order of most preferred to least preferred: eSATA, Firewire 800 (IEEE 1394b), Firewire 400 (IEEE 1394a). USB 2.0 is not recommended.

But ignoring the advice of the people that design the products is traditional for people that later have problems, so ignore them at your risk.

>WD My Book Essential External Hard Drive 7200rpm 1TB

I have been using one for years. Works fine. I have been using it for video editing. Certainly not the fastest thing on the planet but it works acceptable for video so I guess sound applications should be no problem.

USB2 and above is pretty fast, 480Mbit/s which is roughly 60MB/s. I don't think this is actually limiting most drives though the practical speed might be somewhat lower. Actually I think this HD is more in the 20MB/s range.

I'm a bit surprised in fact that this one is still being sold today as I have this one already a long time and bought a few bigger&cheaper ones later. Maybe they upgraded it but kept using the same name, don't know.

This is not a valid conclusion. Recording video is not at all the same as playing from piano libraries.Recording video just streams data out to disk ... and if you fall behind it doesn't matter. The data are buffered, and the system will catch up.

Not so with piano libraries. When you strike a note (or several), you expect to get the sound RIGHT NOW. The library software buffers part of the data, but it still has to reach out to disk to pull in data. And it must make multiple, random accesses to do so. This is not a job for slow disks, and (probably) not for USB 2.0.

According to the product website, the library size of Vintage D is less than 5 GB.

I am wondering if anyone has tried a RAM DISK solution, i.e, create a virtual drive in memory to hold the library for best access time.

Most laptop sold today support 8 GB of RAM and some can go even higher. Now I see a valid use case for a laptop with 16GB of ram!

Maybe I should give it try myself (don't hold your breath, I am trying PianoTeq first, which doesn't need a massive library....)

Lots of folks over at GearSlutz.com talk about RAM disks, and especially SSD disks. But they create music with multiple instruments, and they do heavy processing and mixing. Lots of CPU processing and lots of disk access. The high demand benefits from big CPU, big RAM, and big/fast disk (or SSD).

But simply PLAYING a piano library is not so taxing. I can run any one of a variety of piano libraries on a six-year-old laptop with no problems. It has a Duo 1.7 GHz CPU, 2 GB RAM, 7200 RPM drive, and Windows XP. These days this is truly a low-spec machine, but it runs Ivory and Galaxy pianos without a glitch.

The main thing is that it runs an internal 7200 RPM drive. If run from an external USB drive things might not be so sweet.

Thanks for all the feedback it's a big help.

But if i still wanted to use the WD 7200 rpm Drive for streaming the Sample Libraries, how would i get around this only having USB 2.0 ports. The WD 7200 External Drive has a 3.0 next generation port, but no FW port, and the Mac only USB 2.0.

It's complicated but is there any way around this ? or would it be a case of just having to replace the Mac's internal 5400 rpm Drive for a 7200 Drive ? Can this be done on a 2008 Macbook ?

There's only one way to find out. Plug in the WD drive and try it out. I have my doubts, but there's one way to find out, eh?

But wait ... have you tried running the piano library from the internal drive? Some people have been successful with 5400 RPM drives. It's worth a try.

>Not so with piano libraries. When you strike a note (or several), you expect to get the sound RIGHT NOW. The library software buffers part of the data, but it still has to reach out to disk to pull in data. And it must make multiple, random accesses to do so. This is not a job for slow disks, and (probably) not for USB 2.0.

I agree that if you would start to load the data from the disk only when the piano key is pressed, that would a bad latency. Typical seek times are in the order of 10 to 15ms and on top of that comes all the data transfer latency. But I guess playing can start when the data arrives right away, assuming even the most basic HD these days has plenty of throughput for audio.

However I really would expect all the samples to be loaded into memory BEFORE starting to play, exactly to address this issue. Are you guys really sure that the sound is streamed life from the HD?

The initial part of each sample is pre-loaded in memory. Then the remaining part is streamed when needed (and of course cached).

Not being to familiar with this technology, but how is it that sample Libraries can be loaded in to RAM Memory ? as i thought RAM was only the space in which it gives you to work ? If thats the case could i not simply dump the Sample Library in to RAM as i have 4GB on the Macbook.

Meaning that would solve the issue of not having to place the library on to the WD External 7200rpm Drive, therefor bypassing the slow 2.0 USB connection speed.