Audio for DAW should be on separate drive. But why?

[delite1]

For years I have accepted that my audio files should be kept on an another hard drive distinct from my applications drive. I have just followed this without question. Does anybody know why this is as on one of my laptops I had to put all my applications and audio files on the main drive and I did not notice any difference in performance?

Thanks

Billy

[muzines]

Things like this are good practice for performance reasons but are largely based on good practice from the old days with less powerful systems and poorer performance.

As long as you have drive space available, and your requirements aren't huge, you can record audio to an internal laptop drive just fine, no need to be scared of it.

[delite1]

Thanks Desmond

I've got some 7200 RPM external sata drives to connect via a USB 3.0 docking station but I got to thinking, why can't I just put all my audio files in a folder on my 'main applications' Mac Fusion Drive? The fusion drive is big enough for my needs and gives me true SSD performance and I was hoping to simplify things.What do you think?

Kindest regards

Billy

[BJG145]

For years I have accepted that my audio files should be kept on an another hard drive distinct from my applications drive. I have just followed this without question. Does anybody know why

The thinking behind this is to stop audio read/writes competing with system read/writes on the same drive. See here.

http://therecordingrevolution.com/2010/01/18/optimize-pro-tools-use-an-external-hard-drive/

[The Elf]

Performance is one consideration, but you also need to consider your backup strategy. Audio files can eat a lot of disk space, and you really don't want these clogging up your system drive image backups.

There are ways around this, but a separate drive makes things simpler.

[Mixedup]

Also makes things simpler when upgrading your machine... no need to migrate terrabytes of data; just hook up the drive to your new machine.

[CS70]

All of the above, an the fact that most operating systems page memory to disk on occasion, and controller/bus throughput. However, modern magnetic disk performance and (in PCs) I/O&bus architecture and performance are so improved from times past that backup/etc have a much greater consideration. With solid state devices the performance point is probably completely moot.

My projects aren't big (twenty between tracks and buses at most) but I run all my stuff in a regular (modern) laptop and have no issue at all. In my previous laptop, performance issues were due to operating system services and configuration and typically related to networking or antivirus creating spikes of usage, definitely not to the physical throughput to and from the disk.

Still a good practice for backup tough.

[Martin Walker]

Also makes things simpler when upgrading your machine... no need to migrate terrabytes of data; just hook up the drive to your new machine.

This can be a very important consideration - I moved both of my hard drives over to my new computer, which saved me many, many hours of reinstalling sample libraries, VST instruments and plug-ins, but then added a SSD for Windows/samples to add some go-faster stripes to the proceedings

Martin

[Guest]

This is quite interesting actually.

Could a single 480 GB Solid State Drive negate the need for twin audio drives - and if it's handling recording as well as reading at the same time is there going to be a limit on tracks/ sample heavy VSTs?