SSD & HDD. What to store where?

[Billy86]

Am getting a brand new computer. Dell i9. Stoked!

Will have the stock 1 tb hard drive. Am adding a 1 tb NVMe M.2 Samsung SSD. Will remove the bloatware. I run mainly Waves and Izotope plugins. Not shy using them. Also use AD2 drums and keys, Steven Slate, EZ Drummer, EZ Keys, Kontakt 6 with multiple instruments. So, ample virtual instruments depending on the song. 

Will obviously run the OS (Windows 10) and CbB on the SSD. Want to take most advantage of the SSD for all the stuff I use. What should be on it? All the plugins? Kontakt? All the VSTi programs? What about the samples, which can be large? What can stay on HHD to save space on the SSD? Thanks!

[rsinger]

I have the OS and all audio programs and samples on an SDD. The user folders are on an HDD. 

[razor7music]

I'm transitioning everything to SSD, except external backup..

Edited August 31, 2019 by razor7music

[Billy86]

2 hours ago, rsinger said:

I have the OS and all audio programs and samples on an SDD. The user folders are on an HDD. 

The user folders are your project folders with all the files and associated audio?

[Billy86]

1 hour ago, razor7music said:

I'm transitioning everything to SSD, except external backup..

How much SSD space will you need for that?

[Some Guy]

Replace HDD with a cheap 1-2TB Samsung QLC SATA3 SSD. Really no point using the HDD,  especially at that capacity. The performance tradeoff isn't worth it. Use it for project backup (even then, it's probably too small) - or to image your drive after you set things up for a nice contingency plan in case of emergency. 

Can be used for Loops and Audio if you copy things I to your project directory. Wouldn't want to stream files off of it, and I'd avoid putting Sample Libraries on it, if possible - though it can be fine if you have 64-128GB RAM and use RAM caching in the sampler. 

OS and application on NVMe. Data, Projects, and Samples on the SATA3. 

Back up to a USB HDD. Image System drive to HDD after you get everything set up and updated ?

[DeeringAmps]

I see a “proper” DAW needing 3 drives minimum. 

250gb SSD for the C drive: OS CbB etc

m.2 for your samples; I’ve stated many times Superior Drummer, EZD2, Kontact, all load “yesterday” from the m.2 on my new StudioCat. 

I’m still using WD Black HDD’s for my projects. It is/was my understanding that the issue with SSD  comes with multiple write cycles.  Every time I pose the question; “are we no longer concerned about multiple delete/rewrite cycles on SSD drives”, I get no response. 

A fourth drive, HDD, for general data, backup images, etc. is a must have as well, but it’s your system. 

Good luck with the new system, I “killed” a cheap Dell laptop once trying to “wipe” it clean and start over, but that’s another story...

T

Edited September 1, 2019 by DeeringAmps
Correct spelling

[bitman]

Because of the limited number of writes to ssd issue (Is that still a thing?), I place my OS on the SSD, my audio data drive is an old spinner drive and samples on usb sticks peppered about the usb ports. I used to assign the swap file to yet another spinner drive but that got messy so I threw caution to the wind and just store is on the SSD OS partition as "normal".

Image back up the SSDs when you feel you must because while fast, they have a nasty habit of sudden and total death unlike our old spinner drives which will let you know in various ways that they aren't feeling well for a while before failure.

 

 

[Billy86]

Thanks for all the input. Just realized I can throw a 500gig Samsung SATAIII SSD into the mix as well, which I’ll pull out of my dead computer. Still fairly new drive. So that gives me:

— 1TB NVMe SSD

— 500 gig SATAIII SSD

— 1TB 7200 spinner HDD 

I want to maximize all the available speed I can and avoid choke points when recording and mixing with plugins and VSTi.

How does one know which samplers stream data directly from the drive(s) and which load everything into RAM? (Kontakt, Slate drums, EZ Drums and Keys, Addictive2 drums and Keys). Or do they  ALL rely on RAM, another potential choke point?

Does the i9 cache essentially serve as  “super fast” RAM and whatever doesn’t fit in cache then rely on system RAM? Trying to understand how the data flows.  

[rsinger]

19 hours ago, Billy86 said:

The user folders are your project folders with all the files and associated audio?

No, that's a windows folder. My DAW is on win 7 and if you look at the C: drive there is a folder called Users. I have a hard link there to my HDD. The users folders setup under windows go there, downloads, Music, Pictures, and so on. I usually download SW updates to my computer so they are there. Installers for audio SW.

Audio project folders are on the SDD so audio files are on the SDD.

[Some Guy]

8 hours ago, DeeringAmps said:

I see a “proper” DAW needing 3 drives minimum. 

250gb SSD for the C drive: OS CbB etc

m.2 for your samples; I’ve started many times Superior Drummer, EZD2, Kontact, all load “yesterday” from the m.2 on my new StudioCat. 

I’m still using WD Black HDD’s for my projects. It is/was my understanding that the issue with SSD  comes with multiple write cycles.  Every time I pose the question; “are we no longer concerned about multiple delete/rewrite cycles on SSD drives”, I get no response. 

A fourth drive, HDD, for general data, backup images, etc. is a must have as well, but it’s your system. 

Good luck with the new system, I “killed” a cheap Dell laptop once trying to “wipe” it clean and start over, but that’s another story...

T

I have a 7 year old SSD that still has 92% endurance, and was used heavily and still is used as the main drive in a laptop. TLC drives are safe. 

QLC are less reliable, but they're cheap and I'd use them for sample storage at large capacities. 

Unless you have over 2TB of samples, I'd only use HDD for backups. 

[DeeringAmps]

So “main drive”,  you had your projects on this drive; multiple writes and re-writes?

T

[Promidi]

On 9/1/2019 at 4:41 AM, razor7music said:

I'm transitioning everything to SSD, except external backup..

That's exactly what I have.

[Terry Kelley]

14 hours ago, bitman said:

"Because of the limited number of writes to ssd issue (Is that still a thing?), I place my OS on the SSD, my audio data drive is an old spinner drive and samples on usb sticks peppered about the usb ports. I used to assign the swap file to yet another spinner drive but that got messy so I threw caution to the wind and just store is on the SSD OS partition as "normal".

Image back up the SSDs when you feel you must because while fast, they have a nasty habit of sudden and total death unlike our old spinner drives which will let you know in various ways that they aren't feeling well for a while before failure."

I have two SSD. The OS and all apps are on C. All music files, installers, docs, etc.  are on D. I periodically do an image backup of C to D and also do a backup of D to an external drive. From that I can recover pretty much everything if one of the three die.

I do agree that SSD's have a nasty habit of just stopping rather than complaining first.

 

Edited September 2, 2019 by Terry Kelley

[Some Guy]

I wouldn't even put my Projects on a HDD.  I mean... you have to have some relatively small projects to not feel the drastic seek/latency difference with a HDD - particularly if you're recording audio... Plus, they get louder as they age, and draw more power than an SSD.  Higher Spindle Speeds also generate a lot more heat than a SATA3 SSD.

Using a HDD severely limits the number of Audio Streams you can record simultaneously, so you can't really record i.e. a band with a HDD unless it's multiple HDDs in Performance RAID configuration... and that's 100x more risky than using even the cheapest SSD.  Doing so will completely bottleneck the drive, especially if you are recording at higher bit depths and/or sample rates.

I guess, if you're only doing MIDI/VSTi stuff,  it can be fine...

Really depends on the type of work you do.   Personally, I use SSDs for everything, because they are economical now - particularly SATA3.   HDDs are only for backup. I hook it up to my router and just move projects  to the HDD over the network when I'm done with them (after using the DAW cleanup options to create a project archive and/or remove unused files, etc. etc.).

-----

I don't recommend anyone move their User directories off of the system drive.

Just create Documents, Music, Videos, etc. on the secondary drives and put your personal files there - and then Right Click on a Library and go to the Location Tab to change where it points to.  You can also do this in the Windows Settings app.

Your AppData folder is a subdirectory of your User folder, and you almost certainly don't want that on a secondary drive, since if anything happens to that drive, it will break a ton of stuff on your PC.  The folder is hidden by default, so many people are simply ignorant about it.  Putting it on a secondary drive is not recommended.  Additionally, applications that install for the current user also install into that directory (i.e. BandLab Assistant, Amazon Kindle Reader), among other things.  A lot of binaries and support files for Windows, as pertains to your User Account, are also there.

A safer thing to do is leave the User Directory where it is (as you gain practically nothing by moving it, you just increase risk), and then change the directory your Libraries point to as stated above.

Edited September 2, 2019 by SomeGuy

[Tezza]

13 hours ago, Bill Schreiber said:

Thanks for all the input. Just realized I can throw a 500gig Samsung SATAIII SSD into the mix as well, which I’ll pull out of my dead computer. Still fairly new drive. So that gives me:

— 1TB NVMe SSD

— 500 gig SATAIII SSD

— 1TB 7200 spinner HDD 

I want to maximize all the available speed I can and avoid choke points when recording and mixing with plugins and VSTi.

How does one know which samplers stream data directly from the drive(s) and which load everything into RAM? (Kontakt, Slate drums, EZ Drums and Keys, Addictive2 drums and Keys). Or do they  ALL rely on RAM, another potential choke point?

Does the i9 cache essentially serve as  “super fast” RAM and whatever doesn’t fit in cache then rely on system RAM? Trying to understand how the data flows.  

I would use the 500gig ssd for your operating system, the 1tb ssd for your samples and the 1tb HDD for your recording audio files/projects.

That's similar to what I had but I think I upgraded my HDD for recording to an SSD.

I've also been a 3 hard drive person, however, I would think that 2 SSD's might be acceptable as well on a home computer, the advantage being that you can just install your samples and applications all on the same disk and use the other one for recording. I don't know if others are doing this but it is something I might consider in the next build since I don't intend to change my current DAW/applications/samples much.

Komplete sometimes gets muddled up when I first install it and then have to rebuild the databases which I think is due to my samples being on a separate drive.

[DeeringAmps]

Please no debate here but, in a friends studio we were regularly running 16 plus tracks to HDD; the drum kit being 12 of those; all at 48k 24 bit; on an i3 system.  This to a WD Black HDD.

Of course we we’re light piped in via an RME interface, maybe that helped. 

I’ll stick with the Black drives until Jim assures me “no worries” going with the SSD as an audio drive. One caveat, backup, backup, backup.  Redundancy is our friend!

T

[MediaGary]

9 hours ago, SomeGuy said:

Using a HDD severely limits the number of Audio Streams you can record simultaneously, so you can't really record i.e. a band with a HDD unless it's multiple HDDs in Performance RAID configuration... and that's 100x more risky than using even the cheapest SSD. 

My normal remote concert recording setup uses a lowly dual-core laptop (Lenovo T400) running a 7200RPM 500GB HDD in a caddy where the DVD normally lives.  32 mono tracks is no challenge for this recording setup for capture and playback.  In my studio, I never need more than 24 concurrent tracks for capture, but projects easily grow to 60 tracks through a variety of requirements.  Nevertheless, the regular 2TB 7200RPM HDD was the capture and playback device for quite a few years.  I do everything at 48K/24-bit, except for audio-only CD projects.

I did have to edit a complex instructional CD set that became 300 tracks before all the pieces were in place.  That project began to be troublesome after I had more than about 180 tracks on the HDD, so I moved it over to a SATA-II connected 500GB SSD.  Since it is convenient, I continue using active audio-only projects on the SATA-II SSD, but other than the extreme track counts that can happen once in a while, there's no compelling demand for SSD to manage audio-only.

I reserve my RAID-0 devices (3x 2TB-SSD & 3x 6TB-HDD on an Areca RAID controller) for the video work.  I have gobs (~50TB) of backup HDD's, so it's no problem having a relatively small active audio SSD. 

[Some Guy]

Uh huh...

I can get a 128GB USB Thumb Drive and it will outperform any Mechanical HDD on large projects with Sample Libraries loaded on to it.

That's literally where I have my Logic Pro X sample libraries.

On large templates a 5400 RPM FireCuda Drive (almost guaranteed to have better R/W Speeds and lower latency than your aging 7200 RPM, and far more Head Cache (128MB)) was overloaded trying to read files off of that drive for Orchestra Arrangements.  The thumb drive, which cost $20, is flawless.

Slightly lower R/W speeds, but vastly lower latency.

Before moving it, I would get Audio Artifacting, Drop outs, and even complete crashes of the DAW using the HDD.

They are bad for sample storage, which was the main focus on my post.

But I'd still like to see you record 32 audio tracks to that HDD , because I've tried similar and it never worked out so well...  That being said, I moved to SSDs as soon as I could, anyways.

 

Edited September 2, 2019 by SomeGuy

[MediaGary]

I can easily see how the load of large sample libraries can be a challenge to HDD throughput capability.  That's a much more throughput-sensitive and latency-sensitive application than the mere record/playback of multi-track audio.

I was simply posting my multi-track recording capture and playback experience using a normal spinning (Seagate 2.5-inch 7200RPM HDD in the laptop) drive.  The whole thing with concerts is to reliably get the tracks back home from the venue, and the Lenovo laptop has been stellar in that respect.  I would just fire up Waves Tracks Live with all 32 channels enabled (256 sample buffer size) and throw away the silent tracks during import to a DAW (CbB as the favorite) for post-production. The rest of the remote recording chain was a Behringer X32 Core connected to a Midas DL151 and a Behringer SD8.   

Although it's "tourist info" and not directly pertinent to the primary discussion, I have since acknowledged that >16 tracks remotely was a rare requirement, but having redundancy makes me a more relaxed recordist.  (I was prompted into action after a friend told me a horror story of his laptop failing during a concert capture.)  To that end, I now have a Midas MR18 and a QSC TouchMix16 connected via microphone splitters capturing 16 channels each.  The MR18 records to the laptop, and the QSC records to a native flash drive in a USB port.

In the studio, the (rare) low-latency audio requirements are met with an RME MADI ExpressCard in a PCIe slot; it connects to an X-MADI slot in the M32 mixer.  My work doesn't often involve soft synths (usually just piano VSTi) , although I'm hoping that possibly I can make some visiting guitar players happy with the palette of amp sims in my machine. 

I think the description of my perspective on drive requirements puts us in the same harmonious choir.