Hey Guys. I'm installing Komplete 7 on my new i7 iMac. I have space to put the sample library on my system hard drive, but wasn't sure if it'd be better performance wise to have it on an external. I have ample space on either, just wanna do whatever will run smoothly.

I ended up putting mine on my internal hard-drive but that's only because I didn't have an external handy at the time of install.
I think you would be better served by placing them on you external hard-drive.

If your 2nd drive is 7200rpm fw or esata, people here will generally recommend that you keep your sample library on a drive separate from your OS drive. Internal or external.

If your 2nd drive is fw, make sure that the daisy chain with your interface works properly if your interface is fw as well.

Depends on the voicecounts you expect from the Kontakt libraries. Battery, Reaktor and the other synths are probably fine on the internal but if you are going to push voicecounts high with pianos, orchestral content or other Kontakt libraries you'll want it on the external for sure. The caveat here is that more complex projects or recordings also work best on an external drive...

both drives are 7200rpm and nowhere near full. i'm recording my sessions on this external. it's a firewire 800 g-drive that seems to work well with my duet.

It's just a question of load then. I really have no way to know if you're recording an 80 channel rig for orchestral work (external drive would need to go to this), making heavy use of orchestral libraries & need high voice counts, or just doing electronic VI based music that uses 8-16 tracks on average (where everything might work fine even on the internal drive.)

Personally I have 3 drives for my Mac Pro so I have samples/VI libraries separate from my OS & recording drives, but I no longer move Logic's EXS library & loop library and that drive sees barely any hit under load (it's easier to backup when it's only ~80GB though rather than the 200-300GB it hits once I get Komplete7 + Fxpansion plugins + etc installed.) My laptop has almost NO stock library/sample material installed as I use it more for idea work, so I use an external FW400 drive there for both projects/recording and sample library storage. Battery/Live/Kontakt etc get switched into non-dfd modes when I start to have drive loads and I just need to insure I keep track of the memory usage of things.

thanks for the help guys. i'm putting on the external just to be safe.

This thread is super useful. So it sounds like it is important to put the samples onto an external drive. Would I save my logic project files and audio recordings onto the same external drive w/ the sample drive or is it best to have a second external drive for recordings?

The reason I ask is because I will have an iMAC and MBA and would like to be able to work on the same projects with the same samples on either system.

Ideally you should be running minimum four drives:

1) OS + Applications
2) Sample Library
3) Digital audio/scratch disk
4) Backup