pro tools / virtual instruments - hard drives

[balters]

Is it optimal to have 3 hard drives?

-one where the Pro Tools HD installation is

-one for Virtual Instruments (omnisphere, sampletank, stylus, etc...)

-and one to record the audio to?

or is 2 the same thing? right now i have the PT and Virtual Instruments installation on the same drive...and i'm not sure if its the best way to have it..

Thanks in advance!

[Rail Jon Rogut]

If your samples stream off the drive - then you install the actual plug-in executable to the system drive and you should install the sample data on a separate physical drive - so you'd have separate physical drives for:

1) System Drive
2) DAW Audio Drive
3) Sample Data Drive

If your samples are loaded into RAM then the sample data can be on any drive and you'd only need 2 drives.

Rail

[balters]

thanks for the vital info...well my virtual instruments are

colossus,
omnisphere
sampletank
stylus
ez-drummer

...I know colossus has a DFD (direct from disk) option...but i'm not sure about the rest...do you (or anyone else reading this post) have a clue if any of these stream from the disk or do all these load to RAM?

I'm asking cause i have 6GB of it..i may not need a separate disk if I can load them all to RAM

[Rail Jon Rogut]

EZDrummer is RAM based.

Rail

[jsloat]

Actually,
In stress testing my HD system with lots of virtual instruments,
I found that I needed to distribute the larger sample data files for
certain plug-ins on different disks (different than the OS and different from
other heavy virtual sample disks). Most of the AIR virtual instruments seemed
to play and work nice independent of where their sample data was kept.
I had to spread out the samples for Omnisphere and BFD plugins
to make them not trip up when used together.

-Jay-

[ladewd]

I installed a separate drive for all my streaming samples. I have Goliath, and Omnisphere and the sample sets reside on a 3rd drive. Goliath (Play engine) is kind of buggy, but does work. I'm still using an older version than what is current because it seems to work. I only record 1 track at a time and then bounce. My 8 core Mac Pro does not like multiple instances of Goliath.