SSD + normal harddrive set up on new PC

[Armistice]

Howdy

My new PC arrived yesterday so I've been having a bit of a peek inside.

It's got a 128GB SSD and a 1TB 7500RPM spinny drive. It's a Hewlett Packard work type machine so it appears to be a relatively clean install of Windows 7 Pro - not much crap on there that I can see.

So... everything is on the SSD, the disk is blank. The SSD is about 1/3 full with Windows etc, so that leaves me about 80GB of space on it.

I'll be using Reaper, Addictive Drums and a few VSTis to start off with. What's the best way to start installing this stuff and other programs as I get them? All on the SSD and use the disk for data? It's a Xeon 3.6GB processer with 16GB RAM so there's a fair amount of grunt there at my disposal.

Any thoughts appreciated...

Cheers

 

[Chili]

At first, I would have said load everything on the SSD and stream to the spinny. But now that I think about it, 80 spare gigs can disappear quickly. When you use a VSTi, it all loads into ram and doesn't really stream from the hard drive. So I'd say load your VSTi's and libraries on the spinny and reaper and stuff on the SSD. The VSTi's will take a little longer to load, but you wait 30 seconds instead of 2 seconds.

Those are my thoughts....

 

[Armistice]

Thanks Chili - that makes sense... I didn't know samples etc. were loaded into RAM.

Now I'm about to start undergoing the painful process of getting 64-bit everything.... don't think I thought of that before I handed over the credit card...

 

[sixer2007]

SSD drives are incredibly fast compared to a standard platter drive. So I would say to use it as your software drive with your OS and DAW as well as plugins. Because plugins are relatively small, 80 gigs should be plenty, as long as you save any VTSi sounds to the platter drive. Also, if you want to get into the nitty girtty, you can delegate some space on the SSD to be used as a faux RAM system, but with a new machine, I'd imagine you already have 8 gigs+ of RAM, so that's probably not an issue here.
Have fun filling your 1TB of space!

 

[sixer2007]

don't think I thought of that before I handed over the credit card...

Whether you thought about it or not is pretty irrelevant because it's tough to get a new machine with a 32 bit system anymore. You would have had to requested Win Vista or older. Unless there's a 32 bit version of Win 7, which I don't think exists.

 

[Chili]

Whether you thought about it or not is pretty irrelevant because it's tough to get a new machine with a 32 bit system anymore. You would have had to requested Win Vista or older. Unless there's a 32 bit version of Win 7, which I don't think exists.

Yeah, there's a 32 bit version. At least for the upgrade package. When I got mine a couple of years ago, it came with two dvd's. One for 64bit and one for 32bit. I'm pretty sure the same product key worked for both.

 

[Armistice]

Yeah, for a change I appear to have actual install CDs with this computer - you don't tend to get them with off the shelf laptops. They have both 32 and 64 bit versions.

I installed the 64 bit of Addictive Drums last night - fark - 2GB. And it didn't give me a choice as to where to put it so it ended up on the SSD. I'm not really sure how these things work, but it all seems to run from a smallish AddictiveDrums.dll file in an XLN audio folder with the sound samples in a parallel Steinberg folder, so I might try just whipping the lot over to the disk with the same relative structure and see if that works. I moved just the DLL over last night and redirected the path in Reaper and that appeared to work, which surprised me, but suggests that moving the whole lot won't as the absolute path must be in the DLL.

We'll see. Surprised the installer file never asked where to install though. A little annoying!

Sixer, the machine as 16GB RAM, so that shouldn't be an issue... looking forward to getting all this going but I don't even have an interface. I'm pacing myself so I can set the PC up properly first.

You can see in the "Mix This" thing in the MP3 clinic the chaos I've created by trying to work across systems....