Beeej21
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Anyone using a separate HDD for VST and VSTi, sounds, and effects? Can you replace?
Hey All!!
So, I have a quick question for those of you who, like myself, have a separate HDD where you install your VST effects, instruments, and sound files.
Right now, I am running a RAID 0 (striped RAID) with two 1TB drives giving me a very fast 2TB drive recognized by the OS. So far, everything runs immaculately in X2a since Sonar scans this other location for the VST effects.
My problem is, I'm ACTUALLY running out of room, thanks mostly in part to ridiculously large sound files from EWQL libraries, and many other massive sound files that I've amassed over the years.
I need to upgrade the RAID and have two 2TB drives on order which will take me from a total of 2TB to 4TB.
Can I just copy all the files from the old RAID to the new one (so long as the drive letter and name is the same as before on the destination drive) without Sonar X2 complaining?
It seems to reason that all those .dll files and sound libraries are just being called up and so it shouldn't make a difference if I upgrade the size of the destination drive.
Anyone have any experience with this? Some advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!!
DAW: Sonar Platinum, Windows 10 Ultimate 64bit**Computer: Intel i7 980x HexaCore Extreme 3.33gHz, Kingston HyperX 24GB RAM, ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 MB, 2x 300GB V-Raptor HDD, 4TB RAID-0 VST/Sounds HDD**Hardware: VS 700 System, Kurzweil SP2XS, Akai MPK49** SoundCloud
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SF_Green
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Re:Anyone using a separate HDD for VST and VSTi, sounds, and effects? Can you replace?
2013/05/03 19:25:53
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☄ Helpful
Hi Beeej21,
As long as the drive letter remains the same (and thus the paths that Sonar is looking for), you should be good. You can set the paths for VST's in the plugin manager or preferences, and the paths for the audio files and projects in preferences, should you need to change them.
AMD FX-8370, Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3, Win7x64 SP1, 16Gb CorsairDDR3-1600, GeForce GTX 950 (390.65), SSD 525Gb (OS), SATA 3 & 1.5Tb, MOTU microlite, RME FireFace 800 (D 3.124, fw 2.77), UAD-2Q, Adam A7X, A-800 PRO, CC121 Cubase Pro 10.0.5, SonarPt- 2017.10 (x64), Reason10.2, Live 10.0.5 Suite, Wavelab Elements 9.5.40, Komplete10Ult, POD Farm2.5, Omnisphere2.5, BFD3, Alesis QS7.1, Arturia BeatStep Pro, POD HD500, Alesis ControlPad, ARP Omni, many things with strings. GrSltz My Studio
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Beeej21
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Re:Anyone using a separate HDD for VST and VSTi, sounds, and effects? Can you replace?
2013/05/03 19:38:39
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SF_Green
Hi Beeej21,
As long as the drive letter remains the same (and thus the paths that Sonar is looking for), you should be good. You can set the paths for VST's in the plugin manager or preferences, and the paths for the audio files and projects in preferences, should you need to change them.
Thanks for the verfication SF_Green! This is what I suspected, but I just needed to be sure before I go in and start changing stuff. Much appreciated!
DAW: Sonar Platinum, Windows 10 Ultimate 64bit**Computer: Intel i7 980x HexaCore Extreme 3.33gHz, Kingston HyperX 24GB RAM, ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 MB, 2x 300GB V-Raptor HDD, 4TB RAID-0 VST/Sounds HDD**Hardware: VS 700 System, Kurzweil SP2XS, Akai MPK49** SoundCloud
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SF_Green
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Re:Anyone using a separate HDD for VST and VSTi, sounds, and effects? Can you replace?
2013/05/03 20:02:22
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No problem. I would open up preferences if I were you and familiarize yourself with the locations for everything before you start, just so you know exactly what's where, and you are aware of any potential impact from your RAID upgrade.
Cheers!
AMD FX-8370, Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3, Win7x64 SP1, 16Gb CorsairDDR3-1600, GeForce GTX 950 (390.65), SSD 525Gb (OS), SATA 3 & 1.5Tb, MOTU microlite, RME FireFace 800 (D 3.124, fw 2.77), UAD-2Q, Adam A7X, A-800 PRO, CC121 Cubase Pro 10.0.5, SonarPt- 2017.10 (x64), Reason10.2, Live 10.0.5 Suite, Wavelab Elements 9.5.40, Komplete10Ult, POD Farm2.5, Omnisphere2.5, BFD3, Alesis QS7.1, Arturia BeatStep Pro, POD HD500, Alesis ControlPad, ARP Omni, many things with strings. GrSltz My Studio
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Beeej21
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Re:Anyone using a separate HDD for VST and VSTi, sounds, and effects? Can you replace?
2013/05/03 20:18:29
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SF_Green
No problem. I would open up preferences if I were you and familiarize yourself with the locations for everything before you start, just so you know exactly what's where, and you are aware of any potential impact from your RAID upgrade.
Cheers!
Thanks again! Yeah, I'm pretty familiar with the preferences and locations settings since I set that up manually the first time around with the original RAID drives. Crossing my fingers... tonight the new HDD drives will be installed and I'm hoping for a seamless/issue-free upgrade.
DAW: Sonar Platinum, Windows 10 Ultimate 64bit**Computer: Intel i7 980x HexaCore Extreme 3.33gHz, Kingston HyperX 24GB RAM, ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 MB, 2x 300GB V-Raptor HDD, 4TB RAID-0 VST/Sounds HDD**Hardware: VS 700 System, Kurzweil SP2XS, Akai MPK49** SoundCloud
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Darryl H
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Re:Anyone using a separate HDD for VST and VSTi, sounds, and effects? Can you replace?
2013/05/04 03:12:51
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Beeej, Do you use the RAID for recording and streaming audio, then? (eg. for project folders.) I wondered if the double saving of the redundant array would negatively impact performance. (Wow, that sounds techno-babbly!) d
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Beeej21
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Re:Anyone using a separate HDD for VST and VSTi, sounds, and effects? Can you replace?
2013/05/04 05:08:38
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Darryl H
Beeej, Do you use the RAID for recording and streaming audio, then? (eg. for project folders.) I wondered if the double saving of the redundant array would negatively impact performance. (Wow, that sounds techno-babbly!) d
Hi Darryl! My RAID is set to "0" not "1" so it is a striped setup for speed instead of a mirror setup (redundant backup). My performance is crazy quick (compared to years ago when I wasn't using RAID or even a separate HDD to load my instruments, sounds, and effects. My system is so much more efficient now that I have nothing cluttering my C: drive other than OS files and program installs. I use another 300GB velociraptor 10KRPM HDD to save my project files to. So the recording takes place on that drive, which happens to also be identical to my OS (C:) drive. I only use the RAID 0 drive to store my vast amounts of sound libraries, effects plug-ins, etc.
DAW: Sonar Platinum, Windows 10 Ultimate 64bit**Computer: Intel i7 980x HexaCore Extreme 3.33gHz, Kingston HyperX 24GB RAM, ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 MB, 2x 300GB V-Raptor HDD, 4TB RAID-0 VST/Sounds HDD**Hardware: VS 700 System, Kurzweil SP2XS, Akai MPK49** SoundCloud
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Beeej21
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Re:Anyone using a separate HDD for VST and VSTi, sounds, and effects? Can you replace?
2013/05/04 05:25:54
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***UPDATE***
I opened up my case tonight and swapped out the two 1TB drives for two 2TB drives. Before doing that, I had copied all the contents in their entirety to an external USB 3.0 drive.
Fingers crossed, and sweating like crazy, I recreated my RAID 0 set in the DOS RAID Utility during the bootup process. Launched into the OS, created a simple volume, formatted it (GPT not MBR because I was now exceeding 2TB in total), and named it. It immediately showed up in my Disk Management as a single 4TB drive!! Nice.
I then proceeded to copy all the files from the external USB 3.0 drive onto the new RAID partition. It took about 4 hours to completely copy the nearly 2TB of sound libraries, VST, VSTi, and other effects (mostly .dll files). Believe it or not, this is still much faster than reinstalling all the plug-ins manually one by one.
Because I had named the new RAID partition the exact same as the previous one and assigned the same drive letter as before, when I launched Sonar X2 for the first time after all the files and been copied back over, Sonar began to scan the drive/VST folders automatically. A few short minutes later, I was in Sonar and it was like nothing had changed (except now I have double the space on a blazingly fast drive). Everything loads fine.. we are good to go!!
I plan on always keeping a backup of the RAID 0 partition on a separate external HDD (and stored carefully) in the event I ever upgrade again or if one or both of the drives ever fail down the road. It's just good to now know that I can toss in a couple new drives, stripe them together, and then copy the files back on them and be up and running without a hiccup.
DAW: Sonar Platinum, Windows 10 Ultimate 64bit**Computer: Intel i7 980x HexaCore Extreme 3.33gHz, Kingston HyperX 24GB RAM, ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 MB, 2x 300GB V-Raptor HDD, 4TB RAID-0 VST/Sounds HDD**Hardware: VS 700 System, Kurzweil SP2XS, Akai MPK49** SoundCloud
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SF_Green
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Re:Anyone using a separate HDD for VST and VSTi, sounds, and effects? Can you replace?
2013/05/04 05:41:02
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Sweet - good job! On your third or fourth beer at this point? 
AMD FX-8370, Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3, Win7x64 SP1, 16Gb CorsairDDR3-1600, GeForce GTX 950 (390.65), SSD 525Gb (OS), SATA 3 & 1.5Tb, MOTU microlite, RME FireFace 800 (D 3.124, fw 2.77), UAD-2Q, Adam A7X, A-800 PRO, CC121 Cubase Pro 10.0.5, SonarPt- 2017.10 (x64), Reason10.2, Live 10.0.5 Suite, Wavelab Elements 9.5.40, Komplete10Ult, POD Farm2.5, Omnisphere2.5, BFD3, Alesis QS7.1, Arturia BeatStep Pro, POD HD500, Alesis ControlPad, ARP Omni, many things with strings. GrSltz My Studio
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californiamusic
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Re:Anyone using a separate HDD for VST and VSTi, sounds, and effects? Can you replace?
2013/05/04 11:54:32
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I made basically the same upgrade on my system with no issues. I had an Acronis backup of my C drive and reinstalled off that and it went smoothly!
Hope yours went as smooth ; )
Intel i7-4770 - 3.9GHZ DDR3 - 32GB RAM Sonar PlatinumPresonus Studio 192 Motu 2408 MK3 Waves v9 Spectrasonics Omnisphere, Stylus RMX, Trilion Novation V-Station, Gladiator, ReFX Nexus, Lounge Lizard, Alchemy www.soundcloud.com/glenntolliver
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Beeej21
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Re:Anyone using a separate HDD for VST and VSTi, sounds, and effects? Can you replace?
2013/05/04 12:24:34
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SF_Green
Sweet - good job! On your third or fourth beer at this point?
@SF_Green - Thanks! LOL... I must've had a few too many maybe because I kept cutting myself on the Zalman CPU fan fins when trying to remove the old HDDs.... man those things are lethal! californiamusic
I made basically the same upgrade on my system with no issues. I had an Acronis backup of my C drive and reinstalled off that and it went smoothly!
Hope yours went as smooth ; )
@Californiamusic - You and I are of the same tribe, my friend. I make an Acronis .TIB file constantly after any major upgrade (but not before first restoring the previous image then making the changes or upgrades). This keeps my C: drive so clean. There are few things in the world that feel as good as booting up into a fresh, newly installed OS (and the beauty is, with Acronis I don't have to actually do the new OS install each time)! This most recent project could've benefited from an Acronis disk image of the RAID drive, but I choose to just copy the files/folders as is and it did go pretty smoothly. Thanks!!
DAW: Sonar Platinum, Windows 10 Ultimate 64bit**Computer: Intel i7 980x HexaCore Extreme 3.33gHz, Kingston HyperX 24GB RAM, ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 MB, 2x 300GB V-Raptor HDD, 4TB RAID-0 VST/Sounds HDD**Hardware: VS 700 System, Kurzweil SP2XS, Akai MPK49** SoundCloud
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