Okay -- now for the super-geeky stuff...

22 Mar 2009, 06:12

Here we go:

I'm looking at eSATA drives. Apparently, you can now (theoretically) install an eSATA PCIe card with ports that allow -- hang on to your hat -- 3 Gb/s data transfer. Apparently there are already external (portable) drives with this speed available (see: Seagate, Western Digital, et cetera).

Now for the tough part -- can you set up a drive like this that lets you stream audio/VSTi plug-ins/et cetera? I haven't ever heard of anyone using an external drive for audio period, but I am so new to all of this that I have no clue.

If anyone can provide some guidance/links/whatever, I'll be thankful.

- Sammy

Yes we did.

Re: Okay -- now for the super-geeky stuff...

22 Mar 2009, 06:32

If you install your software or it's core library on a specific hard drive, be it internal or external, it will stream it from there. So yes, it will work like you expect it to.

Re: Okay -- now for the super-geeky stuff...

22 Mar 2009, 07:54

Hey Art:

Thanks for the reply. I did a little experiment about half-an-hour ago. I plugged my little SanDisk Cruzer into a USB port on my PC and transferred the "Stradivari Violin" library to it. I also deleted it temporarily from the hard drive to make 100% sure that the samples were, in fact, streaming off of the flash drive.

Lo and behold, it worked perfectly. Mind you, this was only one sample library, being streamed off of one plug-in. But I sort of expected this; even if the transfer rate is 25Mb per second, you're getting a pretty speedy rate -- especially given that the sample in question is pretty much (for the most part) monophonic.

I have high hopes that if I buy a nice Seagate XTreme or something like that, that I'll be able to stream several libraries at once. My dream is to have 8 parts of Omnisphere, 8 parts of Kontakt 3, and 16 parts of Halion Symphonic Orchestra.

The trick, of course, is to do this consistently without glitches or crashes. One can always dream, I guess...

- Sammy

Yes we did.