I always suggest installing BIAB to one drive, rather than splitting the program and the Realtracks to different drives. Things just tend to be a lot more stable that way for me, particularly since Windows likes to change drive letters for external drives from time to time.

As far as speed goes, I just did some testing - I have the following drives:

C: 250gb SSD (read speed ~510mb/sec)
D: 1tb SSD (read speed ~280mb/sec as the secondary SATA port is SATA-2)
E: 500gb external HDD on USB3 (read speed 82mb/sec)
F: 500gb external HDD on USB2 (read speed 33mb/sec)

I have Realtracks stored in all 4 locations. Using the plugin to generate tracks (since it has a handy timer in it) I get the following (tested 3 times per drive):

C: - 32.77, 31.71, and 32.15 seconds.
D: - 32.22, 32.15, and 32.23 seconds.
E: - 34.74, 32.27, and 31.69 seconds.
F: - 34.93, 32.76, and 31.97 seconds.

So you can see that hard drive speed doesn't make much if any difference, though a keen eye will notice that the first test with the externals took an extra couple seconds - this is the spinup time of the drive. There was also no difference in generation times if the program itself was on the SSD or the external.

Now one thing this test doesn't show is that I have the "saved tracks" folder on my D drive, which is where the plugin writes the files it generates. It doesn't make any noticeable difference on the two SSD's, but on the two mechanical drives it does - if you set the SavedTracks folder to the same drive it's reading the Realtracks from it bumps the generation time up to 37 seconds over USB3 and up to 43 seconds over USB2!

So, my personal recommendation - If you have the drive space, by all means install everything to your internal drive for convenience. If you don't have the drive space, just use the external - but for the best speed, set your Saved Tracks folder to somewhere on your internal storage.

Last edited by Simon - PG Music; 01/12/22 02:08 PM.
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