My 2022 BIAB UltraPak is due to arrive today.
I’m still undecided as to whether I should run it from the USB 3.0 Hard Drive or install it over my 2019 version on my C drive (The RealTracks and RealDrums are installed on my D drive).
Is it possible/advisable to first try the USB 3.0 Hard Drive install (including RealDrums and RealTracks) to see how it performs (speedwise)? Then, if this seems OK, is it possible to simply(?) uninstall my 2019 BIAB?
If the USB install seems slower, how can I then uninstall the USB 3.0 Hard Drive install and then install BIAB 2022 to the PC’s C drive (with RealTracks and RealDrums on my D drive)?
I guess I’m trying to save space on my C drive (I won’t have enough space for a Windows 11 install in the future – I don’t know if that’s important).
BUT, the most important thing is, I don’t want to lose any performance/speed with BIAB/RealBand.
What would you advise?
Thanks, in advance,
Mike
(I also posted this in the BIAB(Windows) forum but this might be the better place.
My PC specs (Windows 10) are:
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700HQ CPU @ 2.80GHz, 2801 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
C drive (SSD): used 77.5b of 118gb (40.5gb free)
D drive (HDD): used 507gb of 930gb (423gb free)

Mike, my advice, for what it's worth, if you're trying to preserve speed and performance install the programs on your main C SSD and put the RD / RT on a separate drive. SSD are preferred as well as 7200 rpm HD's, 5400 rpm HD's not so much.

Not sure how these would stack up against running everything from a USB3 but do understand the need to preserve space on your SSD. By the way, looks like you are close to the limit on your SSD with it being about 75% full...best to leave about 20% free for best performance.

Install the new version over the old version to preserve any add-ons you may have purchased over the years. Then run the most up to date version for the 2022 versions.

Jeff

Mike, I didn't read the other thread but this is a good place for your question.

My system is a lot like yours. The exception would be that I have two internal drives dedicated to BIAB. The program is on its own small SSD and the RealTracks/RealDrums are on their own fast Western Digital Caviar drive. Keep in mind I have the audiophile edition, so it's 11 times larger than the 'regular' version.

In your case, unless and until you might go the route I did, I would install the program (only) over top of your existing C drive. Most of the files are already there so the space will not markedly increase. In the install process as I'm sure you already know, you can direct the RealTracks & RealDrums to a different drive. Again, most of that content is alread there. BIAB only writes the new material and any updated files (and there are some this year).

While USB drives are certainly up to the task of running BIAB and you can even run the whole program from one, any internal drive (even a hard drive) will still outperform the external drive. It may be a luxury to have my program on a separate SSD drive, but I use BIAB every day for work and I do enjoy the extra pep I get.

Jeff gives a good tip about free space. Some experts recommend 15% on hard drives and even more on an SSD. And make sure the Trim function is on for your SSD (or run it manually every month), and never Defrag one.

Thanks Jeff and Matt for your informed comments.
As you both suggest, I will install the program on the C drive, and the RealTracks and RealDrums on my D drive.
I am watchful re my small SSD (118gb) but there's not much more I can delete (I've done disk cleanup). And, yes, the Trim function is enabled.
Cheers,
Mike

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.

That's very interesting Simon. Thanks for taking the time to set this up and for your informed insight. Always appreciated.

Jeff

Thank you, Simon. Fascinating and helpful. I think yours is the first-ever mention of advice where to store the generated tracks for best speed.

My empirical experience, with absolutely no scientific tests, is that starting and using the program feels ‘snappier’ if it’s on an SSD. But generating songs works remarkably the same on my two computers, one of which has the RealTracks on a 10k internal hard drive and the other on the supplied PG Music external drive. On both computers, the program loads from an internal SSD, so the only difference is the location of the RealTracks. Note: audiophile version on both.

Simon, would you consider writing a post for Tips and Tricks? Perhaps something like, What speeds up BIAB, and what doesn’t?

I have observed the same. By changing the location of the "Saved Tracks" to the ssd (C:\) of the main program, I went from generating 30 seconds to less than 10. Very cool.

Always a pleasure Jeff, you know I like to nerd out a bit



Yeah, I don't think it's been brought up before or at least not in detail, but it makes sense that it would be faster if you're not writing to the same drive while reading from it. Figuring that out was almost accidental while I was doing the above testing

I agree that the program feels a little snappier from an SSD when it's initially loaded (probably the spinup/seek time or lack thereof), but once it's going most of the program is in memory so it shouldn't make much difference in theory. For me the bottleneck is the 10-year-old i5, as otherwise I've got 16gb of ram and two SATA SSD's.

I'll think about a tips'n'tricks - what I already posted before is a good start, but I don't know of much more that can be done.



That's a much bigger difference than I had! Are your Realtracks on a USB drive or something else?

On other SSD too. C:\ is NVMe.

In the early days of Unix and I presume most such OSs, we used to put the swap partition in the middle of the disc to keep physical seek times as short as we could. I still tend to do that, though most hard drives have caches that should smooth out quite a lot of that. Of course we shift a huge amount more data now!

When I added a drive to this machine for my trials with BiaB under Wine on Linux and also under Win10, I put all of BiaB on a new drive, partly to make sharing between OSs easier and partly to keep BiaB and other disc access separate.

I have yet to try moving SavedTracks to a different drive.

I changed the drive on my old (dual celeron) notepad PC from hard to SSD. The most obvious change was that from 30-odd seconds to boot up, to about 5s. For some things, SSDs can make a huge difference.

Ah yes, NVMe could make a difference there.



With spinning hard drives, having a separate drive for things like audio data or recording made a huge difference. It's much less so these days with SSD's due to basically instant access time, but can still be noticeable (as MoultiPass found).



Absolutely - I added one into my 2015 iMac (which was no easy feat) and it brought boot time down to ~20 seconds from a previously staggering minute and a half. It didn't help that the iMac previously had a very slow 2.5" drive...