Logic Pro 9 Logic 9 and Multiple Hard Drives

seanmccoy

Logician
Back in the "old days" of Logic 5, 6, 7....there was much discussion about Logic's inability to take advantage of multiple hard drives to improve streaming capability because there seemed to be a bandwidth bottleneck within Logic. A number of power users here and in the VSL Forum came to the conclusion that one, big hard drive was the most efficient. Has that changed with 8 or 9? Other than for reasons of organization, is there currently any advantage to spreading sample libraries amongst several drives?
 
I have 3 500GB 7200 SATA raided internal drives in my G5 (Logic 8) - one for apps/docs/songs, one for backup, and one named Speedy for quick access to VSL library & other samples, etc. (and a 1.5TB external drive for offsite backup) I've never had any trouble once they were set up correctly (PCI card). If you're performing live, a raided configuration could potentially save you from a crash.
LPKeys
 
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Thanks for the info. The reason I brought this up was that it had been determined a couple of years ago that the prevailing wisdom of spreading audio and sample files across multiple hard drives served no purpose because Logic's audio engine seemed to have its own bottleneck. I haven't heard whether or not Apple has addressed this issue.
 
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Thanks for the info. The reason I brought this up was that it had been determined a couple of years ago that the prevailing wisdom of spreading audio and sample files across multiple hard drives served no purpose because Logic's audio engine seemed to have its own bottleneck.

Can you be more specific about this "bottleneck"? Especially before you continue the discussion assuming that this claim is a fact:

I haven't heard whether or not Apple has addressed this issue.

Speaking for myself, I have always worked with a dedicated sample hard drive, and a seperate dedicated audio drive. I also have a seperate drive for video, so along with the system/OS drive have all four internal bays in my Mac Pro in use. Works very well for me.

If you are using a Mac Pro, you could also look at creating a RAID out of two internal HDs to run either Audio or Samples depending on which of these you are putting to most use. Just remember to have a corresponding Back Up - RAID use can shorten the MTBF of Hard Drives.



kind regards

Mark
 
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Thanks for the info. The reason I brought this up was that it had been determined a couple of years ago that the prevailing wisdom of spreading audio and sample files across multiple hard drives served no purpose because Logic's audio engine seemed to have its own bottleneck.

Can you be more specific about this "bottleneck"? Especially before you continue the discussion assuming that this claim is a fact:

I haven't heard whether or not Apple has addressed this issue.
Two or three years ago, when the EXS version of the VSL libraries was growing in size and popularity, some of the power users did extensive testing to see how far they could push Logic in terms of simultaneous voices. Their findings pretty convincingly showed that performance was not improved by spreading the samples out across multiple drives, with the conclusion that Logic had an internal streaming bandwidth bottleneck or ceiling. I have no definitive proof of this, of course, and the threads are too old and buried to be worth searching out. I stopped following the conversation and haven't thought about it for a long time, so I wondered if this issue had ever been verified and rectified by Apple. I never never stopped utilizing multiple internal and external drives for different functions, because it makes for better organization and backup, and to my knowledge no evidence was uncovered that this would hurt performance.
 
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I can say that Logic's ability to play back large numbers of audio tracks improved dramatically with Logic 8, but am not aware of any similar change wrt sample playback.

Presumably they were not trying to split the samples from a single library across more than one HD? I could imagine a strategy such as putting all the EXS samples on one drive, all the Kontakt samples on a second and so on could make sense, but as these samplers need to know where the samples are, the workflow nightmare of opening a preset and having the sampler then spend ages looking around for the audio files would, I imagine, be quite a turnoff in itself?

kind regards

Mark
 
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I'm not sure what their exact methodology was, but these guys were pretty knowledgeable and pretty thorough. I believe the tests were all using EXS24, though, and they likely were putting each orchestral section on separate drives. Anyway, your mentioning that Logic's audio streaming capability improved with version 8 is encouraging. It could very well be that whatever was limiting streaming performance was fixed (and hopefully not re-broken in Logic 9!).
 
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Sorry to revive this old thread, but now that I finally have gotten a Mac Pro and am trying to figure out the best configuration, the issue is before me again. I don't do much high track-count audio recording in Logic, so my main concern is heavy-duty sample library streaming. In addition to EXS24, I'll be extensively using Vienna Instruments Pro, East-West Play, Kontakt 4, Spectrasonics and various other stuff. With Logic 9 in Snow Leopard, is it definitely more efficient to spread these mondo libraries out over multiple drives? Or has the implementation of these customized sample players made Logic's influence somewhat moot? Any relatively recent ideas on the subject would be appreciated.
 
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