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

Hi Konrad,
 
I believe EW state that as a drive gets full its performance starts to decline.
 
I would assume that if your C and D drive are just partitions on the same drive you will not gain any performance improvement by moving the files.
 
I would recommend spending some cash  and buying a 1TB western digital black drive to store your samples on and install the new drive on its own sata channel separate to your OS drive.
 
 

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.

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?

 
Yes. With them being the same physical disk you're asking the same set of heads to do absolutely everything when trying to stream samples, so you will get dropouts, crackles & pops

Question 2:  Has anyone had any similar experience to share with this?  Thanks.

 
Yes. I run EWQLSO Platinum at 24 bit. All the samples are on my dedicated sample library disc, and I can run a full orchestral mockup comprising about 135 tracks, 30+ drum maps for mapping different articulations, and it runs totally glitch free. 
 
The only downside is that the template takes approx 6 minutes to load because they're on a regular HDD. If you want much snappier load times, consider investing in an SSD for all your sample libraries and migrate it all across.
 
Then you can free up a load of space on your system disc, which will also have the benefit of a slight improvement to your system performance
 
FWIW, I've never defragged my sample disc because everything gets loaded sequentially and nothing ever gets deleted.

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!  
 
 

Excellent information.  So it sounds like moving things to C is a waste of time and a separate drive may be the ultimate solution.
 
I can live with the load time (I have that today) as long as thing work once that's done.
 
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....

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.

I use LA Scoring Strings which now reside on their own SSD drive.  This was the best solution as it loads fast and doesn't cause the glitches I was having using a mechanical hard drive.   The preload buffer is much smaller so it uses less memory which frees up memory for other samples.
 
Jim 

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.

you should use SSD drives for vienna dimension strings, i have the angelbird SSD2GO twin drives purple/silver with my logo laser engraved. :)