Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards External SSD appropriate for piano VSTs?

I just purchased a mid level laptop as a replacement to one that died last year on me. I got one at a pretty good price, however the one thing that pushes this laptop back is the hard drive. It is a 1TB 5200 RPM drive. The rest of the specs are fine, with a new i7 processor, 8 gigs of ram and an Nvidia video card. I know a piano vst will run fine with the rest of the specifications.

I don't really want to swap the HDD that came with the laptop and noticed there are external SSD drives available on sites like Newegg and Amazon. Has anyone had any experience running piano VSTs from an external SSD? Is there anything I should be aware of? How is performance? Will I notice any sort of slowdown if I run Kontakt on the internal Hard Drive and the VST on the external SSD? Or should I just install everything (both Kontakt and the VSTs) on the SSD?

I have the Ivory II sample library installed on a fast 128 GB USB 3.0 thumb drive and it works fine. You don't need a special SSD for it.

Which model and what specs define a "fast" USB 3 thumb drive?

It's a no-name model from the bargain bin which delivers a read speed of 200 megabytes per second. Good enough for Ivory.

I run Ivory from a 256GB SSD USB 3.0 thumb drive. Sequential read speed is over 400 MB/s and even random speed is similar to that of a 2,5" SSD. With the added benefit that it draws much less power so I can use it for instance on my Surface pro 3 with an unpowered USB 3.0 hub with ilok, midi and even a mouse plugged to the same USB port (SP3 has only one port....)
Here you have it with 128 or 256
http://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Flash-Voyager-128GB-CMFVYGTX3-128GB/dp/B00LJWSHW6

Please note that your PC must support the full bandwidth (some first generation USB ports from 2012 don't). What type of i7 CPU do you have? If it's at least 3rd gen, it will be fine.

This is the laptop I purchased. It is a new acer aspire model from Newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834315062

it was released about a month ago so I think it should work fine in the processor department. How can I determine if it is 3rd gen or not? BTW, I don't think I mentioned the SSD I was considering so I'm also posting the link below. The USB 3.0 drive you linked looks really good as well. I'm seriously considering it.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA4P02R50014

I'm not really going to be installing much besides the VSTs in the SSD. I already have Vintage D and my next purchase eventually will be Ivory American Concert D.

You can't go wrong with a Samsung SSD, though I can't think of any advantage over the thumb drive DigitalGuy posted. These are probably all massively over-specified. I would bet that a normal thumb drive costing a third of the price would work just fine. Or your internal HDD will probably be fine too. Try it, and buy new hardware if you actually find some problems.

This is a 4th gen, so perfectly fine. You can determine the generation by looking at the first of the 4 numbers after i7 4712MQ. If there are only 3 numbers then it's first gen. Currently we are at 5th gen with 6th starting to appear. The only advantage of the SSD you mentioned is better write speed, which you won't need. Otherwise the thumb drive has the advantage of power draw and needs not cables.

RE:"You can't go wrong with a Samsung SSD"
Beware and check out:
http://www.extremetech.com/computin...formance-issues-being-prepped-by-samsung
it' just one site adressing this problem..google arund: "problems with Samsung SSDs.." It seems to come with the cheaper =more poular EVO series models... it also seems that the more expensive "pro" models are immun to this...
Old Vic