I am thinking of running Sonar live, but after the install and other apps already installed, space on my laptop will be limited. How efficient is Sonar at running CWPs from an external USB (2) drive for live play purposes?
 
Thanks

Don't know about USB2 but it works pretty well with my USB3 drive. Does your laptop not have a USB 3 port?

Depends on what you mean by live play.  Moving audio off an external drive has never been a big problem. It requires more bandwidth if you are shuttling data back and forth between the computer and peripherals and doing live mixing on a bunch of tracks simultaneously. I would expect that most of your traffic in a live gig would be just triggering play of pretty much finished stereo audio, but in that case there are probably simpler applications to use than Sonar on stage..

I have used USB2 external drives for this for years without issue.  I prefer using the drives with separate power supplies, but I have successfully used drives (laptop style) that use USB power.  Note that all these drives were at least 7200 RMP drives.
 
 

A USB2 bus-powered "portable" 5400rpm drive will stream stereo audio all day without problems.

If you're mixing tracks or applying effects live then it will depend on how much of the laptop's resources are required to do that, and how many tracks the external disk needs to be streaming.

The only way to find out for sure if what you want to do will work is to try it and see. Fortunately USB bus-powered drives are pretty cheap these days.

okay thanks guys. So if I have a CWP with say two VSTi's (Sampletank 3+ either True Pianos or Lounge LIzard EP4) and then, say, three or four effects on the tracks....would that be too much? The drive I am using is the seagate freeagent goflex.

I used the drives for live recording not live play...My bad...guess I should read the entire post first!
 

joden
okay thanks guys. So if I have a CWP with say two VSTi's (Sampletank 3+ either True Pianos or Lounge LIzard EP4) and then, say, three or four effects on the tracks....would that be too much? The drive I am using is the seagate freeagent goflex.

 
No idea.
 
Set up a test project that duplicates what you want to do live, try it and see, it's the only way to know.

If your CWPs are on the external drive and your VSTi samples are on the main drive, then recorded audio tracks depend on the external drive and VSTis depend on the main drive. Your description sounds like no audio tracks. If so, no problem with the external drive.

Cool, thanks bvideo.
That is exactly the way it would be.
All the VSTi stuff is on the laptop hard drive and the USB drive will only have the CWP's with any per project audio tracks that are used.