Basically, it's the amount of data that needs to be streamed (and so, the size of each sampled instrument you want to load) that matters. Performance-wise, you're better off putting a second hard drive into your computer (if it's a tower) than using a USB connection, and a USB hard drive probably won't cut it for large orchestral sample libraries, but for something like the odd instrument from Kontakt, or the Omnisphere library, an external hard drive will work just fine. Kontakt, for example, isn't restricted to loading samples from any one location within a single Kontakt instance, you can load samples from multiple libraries spread across multiple hard drives. Depending on the sampler or plugin, you can probably locate the samples wherever you want, even if they're not on the same hard drive. the DLL files) themselves that are taking up the space it's probably sample libraries. If your DAW lets you specify multiple folders that it will search for plugins, then sure, there's no reason why you can't point it to a folder on an external hard drive (and, of course, if you can only set one folder, you could just point it to the external hard drive and move all your plugins over).īut, unless you have a tiny main hard drive and a massive number of plugins, it's probably not the VSTs (eg. However, for the question in your subject, it depends on your DAW.
Do you understand how partitioning works? That question makes no sense.
