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musicman691 wrote: What does have issues is Sampletank 3; it has to rebuild it's database each time.

I have the Sampletank 3 library on the same drive as Kontakt. It rebuilds when there is an update, but only then. IKM support has always been responsive -- maybe a note them would help.

bayswater wrote:

musicman691 wrote: What does have issues is Sampletank 3; it has to rebuild it's database each time.

I have the Sampletank 3 library on the same drive as Kontakt. It rebuilds when there is an update, but only then. IKM support has always been responsive -- maybe a note them would help.

Do you switch drives like I do? That's when ST3 rebuilds it's database; otherwise it's all good. Ditto for Play 4 engine stuff.

Switch drives? You mean install on the system drive, then move it to another drive? I don't think so. Not in front of it now, but IIRC, there were steps in the setup of ST3 to install on a non system drive. I would have done that.

I have the Sampletank 3 library on the same drive as Kontakt. It rebuilds when there is an update, but only then. IKM support has always been responsive -- maybe a note them would help.

ST 3 is not intuitive in that regard and the procedure for updating on a remote drive is not spelled out. Once you figure it out, it is easy.

My problem is that I never remember exactly how to do it. This is what takes the time. When I updated to 3.5, I should have kept notes. Ahhhh... next time.

I think it prompts you for the install location. From IKM site:

Process
-- create the folder for the SampleTank 3 library first, before installing,
-- run the installer that is included within each zip file; that will prompt you where you'd like to put the sounds (you can accept the default if you wish),
-- install the 8 files one at a time, specify the same destination folder for each of the 8 installers,
-- you can install one while others are still downloading,
-- you may need to select a "wrong" folder then the correct one to get ST3 to scan the new files.

bayswater wrote:Switch drives? You mean install on the system drive, then move it to another drive? I don't think so. Not in front of it now, but IIRC, there were steps in the setup of ST3 to install on a non system drive. I would have done that.

You're completely misunderstanding what I'm trying to get across. ST3 application is installed on my system drive but I have the sample data installed on two drives - my main drive that has all my samples and a duplicate drive that has the same samples. I do this so if one goes bad I have another ready to go if/when I need it. From time to time I change using the drives to keep them exercised and not let sit idle too long.

mikehalloran wrote:

I have the Sampletank 3 library on the same drive as Kontakt. It rebuilds when there is an update, but only then. IKM support has always been responsive -- maybe a note them would help.

ST 3 is not intuitive in that regard and the procedure for updating on a remote drive is not spelled out. Once you figure it out, it is easy.

My problem is that I never remember exactly how to do it. This is what takes the time. When I updated to 3.5, I should have kept notes. Ahhhh... next time.

It pretty much updates the database automatically for me and even if it doesn't it's like you say a simple operation. A couple of mouse clicks and done.

I don't know how I'd survive with Kontakt on the system drive, as I have 3 TB of Kontakt libraries by now!

Mike makes good points about why it's still preferable to do what it takes to trick each app to allow an alternate location.

The one that tripped me up and has no solution (other cases stumped me in the past, such as Notion, but I worked with the vendors in those cases and got it worked out) is the brand-new Cakewalk Rhapsody Pro.

Once I get a larger system drive, it's possible that it will honour my ultimate location. I can't know until then, because there are so many problems with the installers if trying to start out on a different drive initially and not having much space on the system drive. So it may be that as long as the system drive has a lot of space, it uses it temporarily and doesn't run into the glitches I've had (and I lost countless hours trying to work around the problem, including using Terminal).

This was what prompted my question, as I suspect as more and more people move away from desktop computers and multiple internal drives, we will see more and more vendors ignore this as part of their functional requirements and/or not do internal testing.

So, I wanted to be prepared, if it really is advisable now to use the system drive for sample-based instruments that are proprietary and aren't going to grow to monstrous sizes like VSL, Kontakt, and company.

I'm curious as to what size you guys set your boot partition to be.

It's always turned out that my guesses have returned to bite me on the rear. They've ranged from 30G to 120G over the years, always being the minimum I can sacrifice in terms of drive space. This is both to maximise my data-storage partition's size (general backup, pics, docs, iTunes lib etc), as well as to allow easy restoration from DU-created boot images - the partition size must be small enough to allow the resultant image to easily be restored to a new one, and the larger the image the less likely it'll be possible in most circumstances without a complete wipe and re-partitioning of the drive in question.

Now that it's been decided that VIs will be on the cards for me later this year or early next, I can't help but wonder how much extra space I'd have to allow for things like Sample Modelling's solo brass instruments, the Spectrasonics stuff, drum VIs and possibly Komplete, bearing in mind that I've a sample drive which I'd obviously use provided the installers / plugs allow me to.

Thank you in advance for any thoughts, peeps. I'd planned on starting a thread on this down the track, but hey, if I can 'jack this one now...

monkey man wrote:I'm curious as to what size you guys set your boot partition to be.

My original IBM PC booted from a 320K partition, but anything less than 250G on my current Mac starts to get inconvenient. That's technological progress.

There is too much stuff, not necessarily VI libraries, that really wants to be on the startup drive, and going through the hoops to put it elsewhere is not worth it.

I've not partitioned a drive in years unless I need to run more than one OS or I wish to set up a repair partition -- say, my daughter needing 10.6.8 so that she can run Rosetta's Danish language program that was never updated to Universal. TTP e-Drive works fine for a repair partition and Apple installs an emergency boot partion when you install the OS (One of many reasons that creating a boot drive through cloning is a really bad idea is that this boot partition is not created).

Other than that, there is no longer an advantage to partitioning a drive -- even less to partitioning an SSD.

Once upon a time, PPCs benefitted from multi threading and it made sense when ATA/IDE buss speeds topped out at 100 or 133. SATA changed that.

mikehalloran wrote: Other than that, there is no longer an advantage to partitioning a drive -- even less to partitioning an SSD.

I agree, but I do usually have more than one OS X available at once, so I have partitions -- three at the moment. Doing it is easy using DiskUtility, and erasing the drive is not required, but Backup is good.

One thing to bear in mind is that once you have partitions, there are some limitations in getting rid of them. You can get rid of the partition at the "bottom" of the list in DiskUtility, but not the one at the top. So it's useful to plan partitioning with these things in mind.

bayswater wrote:

mikehalloran wrote: Other than that, there is no longer an advantage to partitioning a drive -- even less to partitioning an SSD.

I agree, but I do usually have more than one OS X available at once, so I have partitions -- three at the moment. Doing it is easy using DiskUtility, and erasing the drive is not required, but Backup is good.

One thing to bear in mind is that once you have partitions, there are some limitations in getting rid of them. You can get rid of the partition at the "bottom" of the list in DiskUtility, but not the one at the top. So it's useful to plan partitioning with these things in mind.

Thanks for mentioning this. Mountain Lion is the OSX at the top as that's what came with the machine. I then partitioned the drive (it's a 2 terabyte 7200 rpm spinner) into two 1 terabyte partitions with Mavericks on the second one. Then as an experiment I later partitioned the second one into 2 500 gig partitions to host Yosemite. After a while I dropped that partition as Yosemite was too unstable for me to use for ProTools so I'm back to the 2 partitions. Was thinking about dropping the ML partition but from what you just wrote that's not something I should do.

Of course, you could move everything from the lower partitions to upper partitions, and remove the newly emptied lower partitions, but then you're into reauthorizations, etc. Took me three days the last time I had to do it.

bayswater wrote:Of course, you could move everything from the lower partitions to upper partitions, and remove the newly emptied lower partitions, but then you're into reauthorizations, etc. Took me three days the last time I had to do it.

From there, you can upgrade the OS.