Performance of Large String Libraries

For a while now, I have been horribly disappointed with the performance (not the sound) of Hollywood Strings and VSL Dimension Strings.  Even with lots of memory and CPU and few articulations loaded, I have had notes dropping out, horrible Mellotron-like transitions (instead of smooth legatos), crackles and pops, etc.
 
Sweetwater told me that the problem could well be 1-that the disk needed to be defragged and 2-that the disk may be too full.
 
I discovered the D drive that housed my samples had never been defragged (at least in the year and half or so since a system restore).  I kicked off a defrag and it ran all night.
 
Tonight I am going to relocate things I do not need on the D drive to increase the free space.
 
I will report how this works.
 
Question 1:  Does moving things off the D drive (where the samples resid)e and to the C drive (OS) make a difference when C and D are only logical drives and on the same physical device?
Question 2:  Has anyone had any similar experience to share with this?  Thanks.
 
Muchas gracias.
 
The Mighty Konrad

Thanks, John.  That makes sense.
 
I am going to move everything I can to an external drive, defrag again, and see how performance is.  I am cool with buying a separate drive for samples, or an SSD for the strings, but I have so much going on right now, I am hoping I can get a simple solution happening quickly and then think about a long term solution.
 
If the answer is opening the box, installing a drive, and moving stuff, so be it; but I'm sure you know that copying Hollywood or Vienna can keep someone busy for days.   Maybe I can find a showgirl who wants to get started in the music technology business to help me.

The benefit is you could put the new drive in, select your currently installed sample libraries and just drag/drop them to the new drive and walk away
 
It will still take a while but at least you won't need to keep handling the DVD's and feel like you work in a DVD manufacturing facility...I think my EW piano is 20 or 30 disks or so!  
 
 

konradh
But, you know, one thing still baffles me.  If things are loaded into memory, I don't understand why the disk condition matters once they are loaded.  On the other hand, if the samples are streaming, then I don't understand why the load takes so long.  These libraries must use some kind of hybrid solution where they load part of the sample and stream the rest....
 
 
 
 

That's exactly what they do.  I would need 80GB of RAM to load my entire EWQL SO into RAM.

Just as a data point I find that EastWest's sampler, Play, is extremely problematic and prone to issues, even if you have a high performing system. Not everyone has the same problems I do, of course, but I've had no end of trouble with the thing, even when streaming from a dedicated sample SSD.

I've heard several horror stories regarding EW's Play engine, but they all seem to be related to Play 4. 
 
So for the foreseeable future, I intend to stay with Play 3.

Jonesey hit the nail on the head above... the head stack assembly (HSA) in a magnetic HDD is a rigid set of "fingers" which has the head gimbal assemblies (HGAs) on the tips... so even partitioned, the drive can only read/write one file at a time. The O/S drive gets the most use and need to access files quickly, so "data" on that same drive causes competition on files.
 
Two physical drives will allow your system to multi-task more efficiently, especially separating O/S (and programs) from data. An SSD has the advantage of no moving parts, so these are ideal as the O/S drive (i.e. when primarily reading files). I have seen mine get flaky when stressed with read/write operations, so I have defaulted to SSD for O/S and programs, and HDD for data storage.
 
Also, SATA III for all drives is important... I have seen a few folks buy SATA II SSDs and disappointed with speed (a SATA II SSD is a waste of money IMO).

I used to have problems with Hollywood Strings, but putting the library on its own SSD resulted in major improvements.
 
As for Play 4, it acted wacky with Sonar on my system, so I went back to Play 3.

SSD drives are the way the go, if you've got the bucks. They are fast, fast, fast.
 
Scott

--
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