FS, SSL, Ableton Question.

alexis bowles · Post by **alexis bowles** » Thu May 25, 2006 3:26 am

For those who use them to perform on big system.

Is it better to have all youre tracks, loops, clip on a seperate hard drive ?
and can the vibration of the club have an effect on the hard drive. ? skip ?
what type of precaution should I take ?

Thank you all for your precious help.

cheers

alexis

brianc · Post by **brianc** » Thu May 25, 2006 3:45 am

Huh, that's an interesting one.

I've never had any problems with built-in harddrives on laptops, and I haven't heard of anyone else having this problem. If vibration is your only concern, I don't think an external enclosure would make any difference, because they're usually just thin pieces of metal/plastic around the drive (same as your laptop's case).

Hard drives are made to handle vibrations as well as possible, because if it takes too big of a shock, it doesn't skip, it destroys the drive.

alexis bowles · Post by **alexis bowles** » Thu May 25, 2006 3:52 am

Ok got it for the vibration.
and for cpu usage or some other reason.
Is there benefit of putting all youre data on a outside drive ?

a.

clubfoot · Post by **clubfoot** » Thu May 25, 2006 2:24 pm

if any difference, I would have thought this could possibly slow things down. I doubt it. But if you consider that the data would need to pass via a USB cable for instance - it could possibly make a negative difference. I think I'd rather have all my clips onboard the laptop drive (closer to the application).

ps. I have not the technical knowledge to validate any of the above.

revy · Post by **revy** » Thu May 25, 2006 11:33 pm

depends on the speed of the internal hard drive on your laptop. you can get external firewire or usb 2.0 drives that are faster than whats typically built in

rebugz · Post by **rebugz** » Sat May 27, 2006 11:16 am

I think this is a personal like.
Both configurations will handle the vibrations well, but to be sure you can take an extra precaution.
I put my laptop on a freefloat.
Cheap and sure.

http://www.freefloat.nl

alexis bowles · Post by **alexis bowles** » Sat May 27, 2006 5:51 pm

thx, I saw some people also putting some foam under the laptop.

sorgenkind · Post by **sorgenkind** » Wed May 31, 2006 4:20 pm

do not put your laptop on a turntable, the magnetic thing can damage your hard drive.
If your laptop has an anti vibrations utility turn it off -you don't want to kick in when your performing - my laptop has it and I turn it off always before playing in clubs.
As for the external HD I think the standard 5400 will do the job, I have done several 14+ multitracks recording in studio with my laptop and ableton live without glitches and/or dropouts... like 14 tracks playing and 14 recording at the same time without problems so I'd say until internal space is not an issue don't bother carry around one more box.