Is there a better/new way to manage sample libraries between a 2-drive PC and a 1-drive Laptop? [solved]

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I’ve read several posts on this topic but some of them are a bit old, I’m wondering if there’s a better/easier way now?
My primary rig is a Rack PC with 2 SSD drives. My older backup is a laptop with 1 SSD drive. I was on the old laptop when I first started working with C3 so my samples were of course on the C drive.
When I got the Rack PC I mirrored that directory and had no problem locating the samples, as you’d expect.

But lately I’ve had some loading/song state change delays on the Rack PC, as my libraries and plugins have become bigger and more complex. So I want to have my samples on the D drive on the Rack PC, and the same on the C drive of the laptop. And I recognize there may be something entirely different causing the delays. But beyond hoping to correct these delays, getting my samples on the 2nd drive is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, simply as a best practice.

I ready Terry’s and Torsten’s excellent post about a method to create a script that essentially converts path info for plugins, but that’s a bit beyond my capabilities. Any other ideas?

I have considered an external SSD drive on USB 3.0. I have a 1.8TB that’s quite small/portable and USB powered. Maybe I should just use that for the laptop as the D Drive…?
Thanks!
Tom

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Easy way: just make a second partition in your laptop SSD and label it as “D”.

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Would a virtual hard disk work for you? You can create a .VHD in Windows 10 that acts like a hard drive but is really just a big file that stores the contents of the virtual disk. You can put the file on whatever hard drive you’d like, then you give it it’s own drive letter on each PC (S: for example).

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Thanks! I’m not familiar with vhd, I’ll have to read up on that. I like the idea of simply partitioning the c drive on the laptop, that should work fine and I already have all my data backed up regularly anyway. Is a virtual hard drive better than partitioning, for our purposes with live music? Thanks!
Tom

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Hi Tom.

If you’re good with partitioning your laptop, that’ll be a cleaner solution. I was just throwing the idea out if you wanted to avoid splitting up your disk in that way. I’d venture it would make no difference performance-wise.

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Thanks Robb, yeah I’m fine with partitioning. I think I’ll go that route.
Tom

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Sounds like you have an answer you’re happy with, but here’s another possible approach:

Leave your laptop unchanged, but create a symlink on your Rack PC’s C drive pointing to the real directory on the D drive. Pretty sure the performance hit of dereferencing the file name initially is negligible.

This technique is particularly useful for when the software (e.g., the OS) insists on looking for files in a particular directory on your C drive, but you want to take advantage of oodles of room on another physical drive.

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Tim,

Lots of musicians are not skilled in IT, and there’s nothing bad in that. Symlinks might be tricky, so I thought to not recommend him line-command operations.