well in my situation, the advantage was all about freeing up over 30GB of space on my macbook. i use my laptop as the backbone of all of my production work (i dock it in the studio), and take it with me on the road to perform, dj and produce while traveling. now that i've been keeping everything on it's own dedicated drive, i've never had an issue on my macbook with reason having trouble reading refills off of the external. the advantage is all about space.

[quote:7638]Hi Papercut, No problem. It'd be interesting to know for sure if using an external HD does provide some benefit for Reason anyway, due to the general load times. i.e. Operating system and applications being run from the internal and writing / reading information for project data etc. Cheers Rounik[/quote] Right. But even if there were advantages in doing this, after the sounds have loaded to RAM, it shouldn't make a difference, right?

[quote:64269]well in my situation, the advantage was all about freeing up over 30GB of space on my macbook. i use my laptop as the backbone of all of my production work (i dock it in the studio), and take it with me on the road to perform, dj and produce while traveling. now that i've been keeping everything on it's own dedicated drive, i've never had an issue on my macbook with reason having trouble reading refills off of the external. the advantage is all about space. [/quote] Right. This is an obvious benefit. When you had the ReFills on your internal drive and had problems, do you remember how many free GB you had on your internal drive? You're supposed to have at least 10GB free for the computer to function smoothly. I wonder if this had anything to do with the problems you had.

[quote:6729] Right. But even if there were advantages in doing this, after the sounds have loaded to RAM, it shouldn't make a difference, right? [/quote] Well, I can't speak from experience about Reason and refills... but I remember when i used to run Atmosphere in Logic 7 on a G4 Powerbook. ASAIK Atmosphere loads it's sounds in ram. However, when I transfered Atmosphere to an external drive (7200rpm with 16MB buffer, FW400) I swear it ran more smoothly and I could run more instances / instruments!! Of course, this may have been the placebo effect, but it definitely felt like patches loaded quicker and my system was more responsive. With atmosphere on my system drive I still made sure I had about 15GB free space. I'm not 100% sure on this, but especially when figuring a slow internal hd on laptops (5400rpm), an external faster hd with decent buffer can seriously speed up your system, as OS X and app's run from the startup drive and samples, recording can take place on the ext. hd with less chance of bottlenecks happening. I must admit there is probably not enough science to my reasons above, so I'd love to hear from anyone who actually knows ;-) Rounik

yes there was plenty of space still there, and i actually had no problems whatsoever. it was purely out of keeping things tidy and having the additional free space for other things. and yes, it seems that when i'm accessing my audio files via firewire from my ext.HD, that less resources seem to be used.. once again though, i've had no problems with reason ever being bogged down. thats the best feature of reason, everything is made to work together without wasting resources.

Rounik and Silk Wolf、 Thanks for your input. Very interesting that even though it *shouldn't* matter (at least not significantly), it seems to make a difference. The reason for my interest in this topic is that I just bought the combo ReFill package they came out with, and I have about 70GB of free space on the internal HD of my MBP. I'm not sure how much space all those ReFills are going to consume.

No problem! In general (rule of thumb or old wives tale for OS X & Logic) keep about 15% free space on your startup drive and repair permissions after installing large app's and sample libraries. Cheers :-) Rounik

I have no idea how I overlooked this or convinced myself it wasn't possible... maybe since the main reason refills have to be in the reason folder.. either way, thanks for clearing that up!!!

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