PT12: Can I store sessions on Hard Drive?
 

I know it's been an issue before that you want to store your session files on an external device. I'm shopping for a Windows laptop and was wondering if I can store my sessions on the hard drive in Windows 12? And is it something AVID doesn't recommend?

Re: PT12: Can I store sessions on Hard Drive?
 

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Avid recommends a second(separate) hard drive for sessions, but it doesn't NEED to be external(many laptops can hold a second internal drive). Your laptop is fairly new, it probably has a few USB3 ports, which is plenty fast enough for an external drive with either a 7200 rpm spinner, or an SSD. Beyond that, if the system drive is a fast SSD(Samsung 840/850 are excellent), then you can probably get away with storing sessions on the C: drive(even though its not recommended), but consider a few details:
1-SSD's are fast, but usually not very large(capacity), so filling the system drive up with a lot of sessions is not a good idea.
2-recording to a separate drive gives best performance(and performance is not something we will ever have too much of)
3-no matter what drive you record to; don't let it get too full(best to leave 15-20% of free space).
4-system backup is ALWAYS a good plan. So I recommend you buy a big(like 4-5TB) external drive and use it for copies of all your sessions, AND a folder for storing "drive images". A drive image is a complete "snapshot) of a hard drive(like your system drive). If you save an image when your new computer has all your PT and plugins installed and running greate for a month or two, then if something bad happens(like a virus, trojan, drive crash or some update or new plugin trashes your rig, restore to the image you saved and skip needing to do a full re-install of all your software and OS):o

Just my opinion:D

Re: PT12: Can I store sessions on Hard Drive?
 

This one is very important especially for a laptop. Unless the system drive is either an ssd or an extremely rugged spinner it's all too easy to for a couple of unintentional knocks or an oops & drop to kill it (had that happen a couple of years ago). Of course it's also great for what Dave says.

Another thing if you do get the large external drive for backup - don't have it powered up and online all the time. Too many people do that and that leaves it vulnerable to the same kinds of bad dies that would cripple your main drive. You don't have to go to the extremes of completely disconnecting the drive although you can. I have two external drives (one for sessions and one for samples) and each of those has a backup drive and one of those backup drives (the samples one) also has my system drive clones. When I'm done doing the backups I unmount the drives and power them down. Then they're safe.

Re: PT12: Can I store sessions on Hard Drive?
 

That recommendation from Avid is like how old? Decades or what? What has been the average drive speed back then?
Modern drives, especially SSDs, are so fast that you don't have to care where to put your files. Plus, modern DAWs (even PT!) are pre-caching audio files to prevent over-excessive drive-accesses.

And I personally don't like to have drives and other stuff dangling off the sides of a laptop. A nice big single internal SSD is all I would want in a laptop (OK, there are no big SSDs on the market, but you get the point).

Some math:
24 Bit audio at 44.1KHz sample rate leads to a data rate of 132300 bytes/second per track to be read from the disk (44100*3 coz 24 bits=3 bytes). 100 tracks add up to 12 MB/second.

A modern spinning drive can read about 100 MB/second and even the cheapest SSD can read about 400 MB/s. More than enough headroom, IMO.

Re: PT12: Can I store sessions on Hard Drive?
 

The problem with spinners isn't so much the platter speed (although that is part of the deal) but that there is only one read/write head to access data. Due to physics those things can only move so fast and only having one way in or out slows things down. And yes there are big ssd's in the 1 terabyte range and possibly larger but those things are mega-expensive. It then becomes a matter of how much you want to spend?