I am trying to cut down on the 5 SSD’s I am using in my live setup.
One SSD keeps disappearing on the desktop of my laptop that seems to crash GP 5.
So I need to transfer all the orchestral data of the problematic SSD to another larger SSD. Need incremental steps to make sure all data is transfered accurately and does not affect existing GP projects. Appreciate all constructive advice.
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Each plugin will have its own method of moving library references, so you’ll want to query each of those manufactures to get precise instructions for their respective plugins.
After you’re done, test your gigfiles fully and carefully!
Typically, the plugin that plays the samples has a setting for the samples location (drive and folder). What I do is copy (not move) the sample folder(s) to the new drive and change the plugin to point to the new location, and then test. If everything works, I delete the folder(s) in the old location. If not, I figure out what and where the problem is, fix it, then delete the old location.
I have 3 external 2 TB SSDs, one Thunderbolt 3 and two USB 3.2. The TB3 drive is my main samples drive and one of the USB drives has less often used sample libraries. Over time, I’ve had to move some seldom used sample libraries to my other USB drive that I use primarily for backups. I’ve had to move sample folders several times. The worst is when a new instrument installs its libraries on the internal drive with no option to install elsewhere. Those tend to be the most problematic to move. Sigh.
[rant]
And I don’t even want to get into how IKM installs Syntronik libraries in SampleTank folders, but which one? ST3 or ST4 or both? Grrrrr. I uninstalled SampleTank and all of its libraries because I hated ST and wound up never using it, but I had to figure what to do with the duplicate Syntronik libraries installed in ST3 and ST4 folders.
[/rant]
I have literally just finished building a new PC (e.g. Windows based) last week, including moving several internal and external SSDs to newer, larger SSDs, and consolidating several external HDDs into one external SSD.
The trickiest part were the two internal SSDs - a 2TB main (C:) drive and second 2TB (D:) drive. Since they were Samsung 970 EVO Pro drives, I used the Samsung Magician software to clone both disks to Samsung 990 EVO Plus drives (2TB and 4TB). 99% of my libraries were on the 2TB D: drive, which I cloned onto the 4TB drive. It went flawlessly except for an operator error (me!) where I didn’t clone and transfer the system partition before the main D: drive partition. The result of this is the inability to make a USB recovery disk for my new setup. There are ways to solve this, but a pain in the butt.
For my other external HDDs and SSDs, I used R-Tools Technology’s R-Drive Image software to do that job. I’ve used this tool for almost two decades and my main go to tool for this type of thing, but there are other fine software tools that will work as well. I used the Samsung Musician software since I had it and was using Samsung SSDs (it doesn’t work with other manufacturer’s SSDs), but R-Drive Image would have done as well..
The results - all my sample libraries and programs, including GP, worked immediately on my new computer without having to do anything except for the following: 1) Dreamtronics Synthesizer V - I had to uninstall and rebuild my voices library, and 2) Waves plugins and subscriptions. The Waves issue was the most vexing of all. They only let you recover your licenses once per year if you don’t deactivate them first from your old hardware. None of the other manufacturers software had that issue or limitation. Frankly, I was amazed. All my i-LOK tethered programs worked, IK Multimedia worked, KVR media worked, Korg software worked, Native Instruments, everything worked at startup except Dreamtronics and Waves. All the file references were the same as the drives were cloned to identical new drives, so all my Gig files, everything worked from startup.
Bottom line is I had a very positive experience with minimal problems. It’s do-able. You just have to do your homework and plan to minimize any impacts. Hope this helps!
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