Maschine, External Hard Drive

[DexterBee]

Just recently bought a new macbook pro. I have a Gdrive 1tb 7200rpm external hard drive that i would like to use for production purposes. What I wanted to get is opinions on how would you utilize the storage properly? Stock sounds on the actual laptop, and the external drive for any additional samples? Or everything on the hard drive? Id like to keep future VSTs, sample libraries, etc. in consideration.

Im just trying to have an organized structure, with potability in mind. It'd be nice not having to lug around an external all the time, although its not imperative. Shoot me some options and opinions. Hope this makes sense, thanks for reading.

[botstein]

I keep music (DJing, listening, sampling, etc) all on external disks, and all necessary music software, VSTs, sound libraries, etc on my internal SSD, in the Shared directory (this is where Komplete and a lot of NI content installs). This is what I recommend.

[Tarekith]

I keep all music related files on the internal drive myself, hauling an external drive around just to access your samples/music can get old. Better performance too.

[DexterBee]

I keep all music related files on the internal drive myself, hauling an external drive around just to access your samples/music can get old. Better performance too.

What if i take something like komplete ultimate into consideration? So much content. Should I pick and choose what content goes onto the laptop and place the rest on the external? (I picked up the cross grade when it was cheap last year during the holidays).

[botstein]

What if i take something like komplete ultimate into consideration? So much content. Should I pick and choose what content goes onto the laptop and place the rest on the external? (I picked up the cross grade when it was cheap last year during the holidays).

No put it all on the external hard drive. I have Komplete Ultimate and it a very small part of my library / hard disk footprint dedicated to music. Basically, my internal drive is an empty as possible, and the remainder is 85-95% full of music-related stuff, and the other 5-15% is other BS (video production stuff for maschineskills.com, which takes up some spake, coursework, CAD designs and such for my synth-making).

[Tarekith]

Why would you leave the internal drive almost empty?

[botstein]

Not "almost empty", as empty as possible, for the maximum amount of free space. This way, I can export video projects (sometimes in 4K) to my SSD, which takes about a fourth of the time that it would to export them to some external drive. It also lets me record lots of tracks simultaneously. OS X uses really a lot the free space for other things, including using it like RAM ("virtual memory"), various images (sleep/swap/tmp/var), and so on. It runs better with more free space (with diminishing returns, of course). All this performance becomes really important when I run Ableton or Bitwig with lots of Silent Way plugins, multiple Maschine instances, and recording my set, alongside Traktor and Resolume and sometimes also Screenflow.