3 hard drives or 1 for VST/VSTi use?

pikingrin

pikingrin

what is this?
(If this needs to be moved, please feel free to do so. Couldn't make up my mind whether it belonged here, in the VST plugs section or even in the Newbies section.)

I'm trying to figure out the easiest way to go about doing this. I've got a cheap tiger direct computer (i5, win7 64bit home premium, 16gb ram) with a 500gb HD partitioned from the factory into 2 x 250gb drives. I've got Cubase loaded on the main drive, along with all of my VST plugins. The other 250gb partition is home to my VSTi files and libraries but I'm out of room. I've got a 2tb external USB3.0 (backup) drive and a firewire 1tb (music files) drive, as well as an older 80gb IDE drive in an external bay(USB 2.0) that could serve as extra storage for smaller libraries. For ease of operation, would it make more sense to move all of my VSTIs and their corresponding libraries to a single external drive or just to split them up to the 2 separate drives - 1 x 250gb existing partition and 1 x Xtb external drive?

I'm wondering because I'm out of room; I installed IvoryII (Steinway D) on an external and I've moved the .dll into the Cubase VST Plugins folder and it doesn't work. Pretty sure I need to move the .dll back to the Ivory folder and tell Cubase where to look for all other VST/VSTi files but then I'm scattered over 3 drives. I've got 2 other 30+ gb libraries yet to install and they will be going, most likely, on the 2tb drive with Ivory (I will get another 1 or 2 external drives for backup) and I'm thinking it would make more sense for all of the VST stuff to be in one area rather than spread out - at least for processing's sake. Or maybe it doesn't matter. I can mic a guitar cab but I am behind on my PC knowledge...:(

I'm using Cubase 7.5.X; if I left anything else out that could be useful let me know and I will fill in the gaps. Thanks in advance for reading this book...hope it's not too much!
 
What I've seen suggested here, (and what I've done myself as well) is have 3 drives:

- system drive. install Windows and applications on it
- samples drive. Make this the destination for your sample libraries
- audio drive. Make this the destination for your recorded audio

In my case, I have a giant rackmount server chassis that accommodates these (and has room for like 15 drives in all, ugh). So all of mine are internal. The system drive is SSD (250GB), the sample and audio drives are HDD (1TB each). I like this setup, and it keeps a nice division of labor as far as read/write heads, and it's fast as hell with Windows installed on an SSD. Then I have a 4TB NAS that I use as a backup destination for my audio and samples.

So if I'm reading your specs correctly, I guess that I'd go with:
- Windows and Cubase installed on your internal system drive
- dedicate one of your external drives exclusively to samples.
- dedicate one of your drives exclusively to recorded audio. I've never used an external drive for recording audio, so I can't really suggest that with any confidence. It might work, I think a few users here do just that.

Personally, I'd ditch the 2 partitions on the 500GB disk and just have a single 500GB partition. Simplify things a little, just to cut down on the number of drive letters you have to remember!
 
Thanks Tad, I guess I have some moving around to do. Makes more sense to do it that way; I always had a dedicated drive for my song files but that PC has long bit the dust and now here we are. I'll have to do some googling to see how to remove that partition on the main HDD...
 
pikingrin said:
Thanks Tad, I guess I have some moving around to do. Makes more sense to do it that way; I always had a dedicated drive for my song files but that PC has long bit the dust and now here we are. I'll have to do some googling to see how to remove that partition on the main HDD...
Click to expand...

I was going to say, rather than "unpartition" the system drive why not just replace it with an SSD? But then it came to me that it might have a hidden Recovery partition on it which you would need if things ever went seriously T's U!

However, do you have a the Windows DVD? If not, did you make a set (of 3 DVD R) Recovery discs on the day you took charge of the computer? If you have/did neither you COULD try cloning the existing "C" drive to an SSD but it is not a task for the feint hearted (I have never tried!) . If you have the slots, PCI/PCI-e USB cards are pretty cheap. I have 1 TB USB 3.0 drive and it is bloody fast.

However you eventually sort things out I would seriously consider a NAS drive (at least 2GB) on copper, in another room as a total backup, be quite slow but you can do it during the night!

Dave.
 
Yeah, after a little research on why the 500gb came partitioned, it seems that the D drive is there for some kind of backup purpose. The only files I see are the ones that I put there but it is showing that not all of the 250gb (minus what I added) is available. No, I don't have a windows disc and no, I didn't make the DVD-R recovery discs either...:(

I'm getting another external HD, at least another 1tb, and going to move all my VST/VSTis and libraries to that thing. That will basically put everything except Cubase and Windows on external drives.

I've got a 2TB drive that sits on my network for my macs, their Time Machine backup thing, I'm wondering if I would be able to use that same drive for my PC as well...
 
Click Start> right click Computer then Management> Disc Management and you should have displayed all the partitions of all the discs in the computer (it should also tell you you have a "Healthy Boot Partition". If not seek help!)
If you do indeed have a Recovery Partition simply fitting a new SSD is not a trivial matter however I did once copy my W7 OS onto a virgin drive using the recovery discs supplied by HP, so It can be done.

I am surprised you don't have a set of discs? When you first fire up an new PC (W7 anyway) there are various procedures and setting to go through (password for one) and one of these is an invitation to make a set of recovery discs. Trouble is, you can only do this once (afaik) so maybe the supplier has them?

There is a moral here...FFS get a Windows disc because ***t'appen!

Slight apology! It seem that only HP computers have the Recovery disc system I mentioned. There is however a Recovery procedure (NOT to be confused with "Restore") in W7 OS and to use this I am pretty sure you need you need to make a System Repair disc whilst things are good.
Dave.
 
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