[Darryl Ramm]

5400 rpm storage drive. What is that used for?

You would likely have been better maxing out the size of the NVMe SSD and putting *everything* on that super fast SSD instead of going for much slower HDD... even multiple of them will be a lot slower than that one drive. Old advice to use separate drives does not apply with these PCIe SSDs, you will make stuff *worse* by using multiple much slower HDD. Avid has not updated that crappy recommendations in many years. I've pleaded with them to fix it, just do not understand what is wrong Avid not fixing this misinformation. (Jeffro -- what do you need to help get this fixed???)

What video are you taking about? Inside Pro Tools? What resolution/format/codec?

Where are your video assets vs audio? They should be on a dedicated video drive.... since you are using slow old HDD. Again, start by tying to use one super fast NVMe SSD.

We need to know actual useful details, like exactly what make/model drive connected exactly how.... which is why you are expected to post a SiSoft Sandra report when posting here.

Start at “Help us Help You” up the top of every DUC web page and follow the instructions there on how to post a Sandra report, run the report with all drives attached and describe where audio and video files are on the partitions in the report. Search DUC fir other folks Sandra Reports to see what Sandra reports are supposed to look like do you post the correct stuff... ASCII text only, no screen shots.

Your seemingly weak disk setup is the first suspect here. You may still be low on RAM even if it does not seem so, what is your Pro Tools disk cache set to? How large is the audio in this session? What does the disk cache and memory meters show in **Pro Tools** as you startup a session and start doing stuff?

Once you have posted a Sandra report. Try working with a small session with the Audio and video both on the NVMe boot SSD and disk cache set to a few GB. How does that perform?