DP6/Adding External Drives to Macbook Pro

[BrentWoody]

Greetings,

I am running DP6, along with various virtual instruments, on a Macbook Pro 2.2 Core 2 Duo with 4G RAM (the max on this machine) and a 320G HD, 10.6.3. I want to add two external drives, using the internal drive as the boot and application drive, one drive with instrument samples, and one with DP6 projects. My question is, what is the best/fastest/most reliable way to do this? Is it to add a PCI card to the MBP and connect to an eSATA drive (if so, which card and which drive)? USB 2.0? Firewire? Etc. Any input is really appreciated.

Thanks!
Brent

[pencilina]

Hi,

I'm sure there's better ways to do things but FYI I'm able to get a full orchestra (KH diamond in Kontakt 4) streaming quite well using a FW400 drive for both audio and samples with my 2.4 MB. Sometimes I have to increase DP's playback buffer to 1024 to avoid glitches when mixing thick arrangements. As per suggestions here, I got a program called Spotless and it turns Spotlight indexing off on my drives- this made a massive difference. I also ugraded the internal drive to a 7200 rpm 500gb thinking I might be able to run samples of it but it seems like I get better performance from the exteral FW. That all said I bought EWQL Choirs and it barely works (I run it on a seperate PC now)- maybe its just Play not getting along with Kontakt. For non orchestral MIDI stuff I can work with a 256 buffer with no latency and very little issues. I would stay away from usb 2 and since you have the option go FW800 and see what happens. I skipped DP 6 but also have found 7.12 to be stellar- the absolute best most stable efficient version of DP in the 12 years I've been using it.

Best,

B