Hi there,
is it possible to download and install expansion packs on a USB Stick? I tried to do this via the license manager because there isn’t enough space left on my SSD hard drive. But I got an error message.
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Yes I just tried this too and it won’t let me so it looks like the answer is no.
The only issue I could see with using a USB drive would be that you’d need to have the USB plugged in all the time or at least when you run the LM but I don’t think that’s why it won’t let you download to one.
Maybe contact support at support@bfddrums.com and see what they say but it should be able to be done.
A feature request perhaps?
Of course you can always move your downloads to a USB drive after downloading and if you don’t have room to temporarily download expansion kits than I would try to make room.
Steve
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Would a USB drive be able to stream that much data at once? My guess would be a no, hence BFD not being into it. I know my old Behringer 16 channel mixer was not happy with USB drives and recording and playback from standard USB drives. It needed to be something superfast.
A USB3 SSD external drive might cope with it tho? But I guess if the OP has one of those, they could stick in the PC and all this would be moot 
Downloading to and installing from, yes, no problem. Just set that in Preferences on the LM before you start the download process. You can’t change it while a download is running, so you have to change it first.
For running from, as a practical matter, no, you can’t install your content to a USB stick. The installer will happily put the content there, and BFD3 will also look for content there if you tell it to. Settings aren’t a problem. The problem is that a USB stick won’t have the speed and will overheat if you try to use it like that.
A better solution is to install your content to an external SSD. That’s how I do it, for all my sample content - not just BFD. Works like a champ.
In general, the best practice for samples is to keep samples of all kinds on an external drive. A 7200rpm is fine for BFD, and for years I used 5400rpm drives. But SSDs are faster and more reliable, and there’s just no reason not to get one.
A 1TB drive is cheap, and it’s a lot of BFD content. And if you are using something like Kontakt for other sample sets, then it becomes immediately worth it to have larger dedicated drives just for samples.
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I just tried this to a newly formatted 32GB USB and the LM wouldn’t let me change the download location to the USB. I tried formatting it in exFAT32 and NTFS but still no joy.
Steve
Just the same: LM doesn’t let me choose the USB Stick as a download location.
An error message tells me, there would be not space left on it, which in fact isn’t true.
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Will try to download the installation files to an external hard drive.
For the final installation of the expansion on my internal SSD there would be enough space left.
I have used a Samsung T5 for years and it was all good. I just upgraded to Samsung T7 2TB for all BFD and Native Instruments Libraries and it has been working perfectly for the past couple of months so far. I have never used a USB flash drive so no comment on that, but I do have an old Sandisk Extreme Pro USB Flash Drive which could possibly work as it is very fast but have not tested it. They come as USB3.2 now so it might work with 512GB storage and the 420 megabytes read speed is fast enough. Would be interesting to know if it works.