Hi everyone. I use Cubase 12, Wavelab, and Dorico. My machine is a solid state windows pc. I have been using composer cloud from East West for a few years now. I have most of the VSTs on an internal drive but I would like to download and use all of the East West VSTs and etc. I would move the additional VSTs to an external drive. Does anyone use external drives for VSTs? This may be the most cost effective solution for me because PC Audio labs built my studio pc a few years ago and there is no more room for another internal HD to be added. Any thoughts and suggestions would be appreciated.
How fast is your internal drive?
You can run black magic disc speed test on it.
It’s hard to say how fast your drive needs to be because it depends on how many instruments you’re running at the same time. But you can load more of your instruments into RAM too which will take a lot of the load off of your hard drive. I’m sure there’s a way to set that parameter in Opus and Play. Perhaps someone else can pipe in on that.
I would think the best thing to do is test your internal drive speed, and then buy a couple of drives of different capabilities, and test them too. And then return the one you don’t want or need.
VST2 plugins you can keep where you like. You tell your hosts where they can find them. Still, different plugins may expect to find their content and other resources at a very specific location (see instructions and installers for your plugins).
In general, you’d keep VST3 plugins on Drive C, but you can put the content on other partitions/drive through the EW library manager.
VST3 plugins should always be in the same place on a Windows machine.
%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Program Files\Common Files\VST3
From VST3 you can also have subfolders if you like. I.E.
%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\Steinberg
%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\EW
%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\Plogue
If you really want to host plugins on another partition/device you could use ntfs file system junctions (mklink /j) that ‘point’ to directories on some other partition. This can also work for content.
A filesystem junction is similar to a windows shortcut or a symbolic link in terms of function. In Junction form it’s done through the OS and Filesystem, so it’s invisible to apps themselves. As far as they know it’s all living at that junction path.
In the thread linked below I give an example on moving some stuff in ProgramData to a new drive/directory and then making a file-system junction that points to it from the original location.
Thanks for the replies guys. I think, just to be safe on this, I will get with PC Audio Labs and pay for some official guidance. I can do the work but have the tech pros help me get all done correctly on the first try. Thanks all! Jim 
Thanks for the replies guys. I think, just to be safe on this, I will get with PC Audio Labs and pay for some official guidance. I can do the work but have the tech pros help me get all done correctly on the first try. Thanks all! Jim
I put all vst’s on C drive and all their content on a separate D drive
My EW data(samples etc) reside on an external TB3 SSD. The Opus player is wherever MacOS puts it(well, Library/Audio/Plug-ins/VST3 to be exact)
I have all my heavy hitter libs/data on external disks. Otherwise I would need a 8TB SSD which is really expensive. Works fine.
I have my EW samples on a QNAP TVS-672XT NAS and it mostly works fine other than the usual crashes that Opus is (in)famous for, even with preload turned off. I get 1300-1400MB/sec read when connected via Thunderbolt. It’s nowhere near as fast as the internal SSD (3800-4000 MB/sec read) but it’s enough.
I’ve tried putting some EW libs on my Qnap TB3/10GbE NAS, but loading instruments was way slower. Connected via 10GbE, BTW. BM Speedtest gives 660MB/s speeds, but in practice loading from DAS TB3 is nearly instant and with NAS there’s a 10-20s delay.
Also, copying over EW libs from DAS to NAS is really slow.