MacBook / FW external drive to run Garritan Steinway?

[FaustC]

Does any one here use laptop to run Garritan Steinway? If I use an external firewire 3.5" 7200 rpm drive, will I be able to run Garritan Steinway?

I plan to buy a good piano sample plugin soon. Any suggestion and answer will be helpful. Thanks!

[Sonare Coeli]

Does any one here use laptop to run Garritan Steinway? If I use an external firewire 3.5" 7200 rpm drive, will I be able to run Garritan Steinway?

I plan to buy a good piano sample plugin soon. Any suggestion and answer will be helpful. Thanks!

I do not run the Steinway, but I'm running GPO on my Mac Book Pro. A lot of people install the samples from their libraries on an external drive, and it works great. If you plan to do this you should:

Install the Aria Steinway sampler on your main internal hard drive,
then install the samples on the external hard drive.

You have a fast external drive, so it will work well. The only thing that will require your external hard drive to spin up is when you load the samples. Once they're loaded into your RAM, they'll be used by the Aria player on your main hard drive.

[FaustC]

Thanks! But I think each Garritan Steinway perspective's size is about 6-8 Gb, they probably use disk streaming technology. Unless someone actually use it, it's hard to tell.

[jjloving]

This isn't your exact situation, but it may help give you a rough idea until someone can provide a more accurate response. I'm running the Pro version of the Steinway from an external 7200RPM SATA drive on a 2.21 GHz CPU with no problems. I'm using the 16bit samples, and the perspectives average around 7.5 GB. Also note that you can turn off the sympathetic & sustain resonances, ambience, and at least in the Pro version each perspective has 4 load options, so you can eliminate, say the soft pedal samples if you won't need them.

Again, I'm not on a laptop, but at least it's a "real-life" performance report. Hope this helps some.

Jon

[KeithW]

Does any one here use laptop to run Garritan Steinway? If I use an external firewire 3.5" 7200 rpm drive, will I be able to run Garritan Steinway?

I plan to buy a good piano sample plugin soon. Any suggestion and answer will be helpful. Thanks!

Yes, use a MacBook Pro with an external 7200 rpm drive (USB 2.0 interface) and it works just fine. The player and one of the listening positions is on the internal drive, and the rest of the positions are on the external drive.

Keith Walls

[karvasika]

I'm running Garritan Steinway from my internal hard drive (Seagate Momentus 7200rpm) on a Macbook Pro 2.4GHz. The HD isn't the problem, it's the internal sound card. It does work with the internal card too, but you can't get the latency too low - if you have an external audio interface, you shouldn't have any problems.

I don't know how it runs on a 5400rpm hard drive.