Quote:
Originally Posted by ejs
Hi, I recently bought a Mac mini to run Pro Tools subscription (specs in my user profile) I'm having a hard time deciding if I need to buy external drive to dedicate to audio. I've seen posts that suggest the system drive in the Mac mini can be used however, Avid knowledge base still says "One or more hard disk drives dedicated for audio record and playback"
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If only somebody had provided info about this in the thread you are already posting to...
"If you have a PCIe/NVMe boot drive then the best place to put your sessions is often that drive not an external drive, certainly not an external old HDD. For small sessions you might get away running them off a SATA SSD boot drive..."
Avid''s knowledge base article is horribly out of date. All their comments on disk drives are from prehistory. They seem unable, or just don't care enough to update this info.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ejs
I believe I want to purchase a fast SSD external Thunderbolt 3 to use as a dedicated audio drive such as G-Technology 1TB G-DRIVE mobile Pro Thunderbolt 3 External SSD. My old system used a dedicated 500gb Lacie Firewire.
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Yes that's a PCIe/NVMe drive similar to the internal SSD, but the internal SSD is already so fast you will not need this external dedicated drive. And especially for portable applications, you likely decrease reliability be using an external drive with a fragile cable connection.
If you wanted to donate money for an unneeded external audio drive personally would use a Samsung X5 drive. I don't have anything bad to say about this drive but I'd rather purchase drives from the leading SSD vendor who controls the whole stack from NAND chips to controllers to firmware... and who does not depend on their party controller chips and firmware, and is able to fix issues themselves.
The harder question is often how much space do you need for samples and where are you going to put them. Putting samples on the same drive as audio is often much more demanding that putting audio on the boot drive... but again these modern drives are so fast (and modern Pro Tools disk cache hides many sins anyhow) you can typically do that, *if* there is space.... so my advice to mac purchasers is to do whatever is possible to max out the size of that internal SSD, even at Apple SSD price points.
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AND a 2nd Larger capacity external drive to use for Time Machine backups of both the Audio drive and System drive of the Mac mini (2TB with 1.5TB free) like the G-Technology G-DRIVE USB 3.0 10TB External Hard Drive (0G05016). Does this seem like a sound way to spend the money to optimize my system for performance and backup? I just upgraded from Pro Tools 10 on a 2011 MacBook Pro so please forgive my ignorance of these newer technologies. Thank you.
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You need to think through in detail what exactly is involved in recovering from any failure or user mistake. Time Machine is an awful tool to use for system backups. It can be useful for backing up user documents and sessions... but I would prefer to manually copy important sessions to archive them. And do so in multiple different places, onto multiple different media. Including some offside. And include copying to cloud storage like Google Cloud. I would not rely on just SSD for long term storage. HDD are more proven, and I'd be looking for WD based HDD units (which G-Tech, owned by WD, will use).. but you want 7,200 rpm drives ... which the one you are looking at has (be careful of other WD external drives they do tend to package some slow/crappy drives in external enclosures). As already note, you need multiple of these drives.
Cloning the boot drive with Carbon Copy Cloner is much better that using Time machine and what many people here do. If a failure happens you just connect that clone drive and boot off it and are up and running... for that reason you might actually want to clone to a fast SSD like a Samsung X5. That's what I do... I have one Samsung X5 amongst my other slower boot drive clones (mostly Samsung T5). I also use that fast SSD for testing new macOS releases using another APFS container on that drive. SSD for boot drive clones for speed.... but they are not relied on for long term archives so OK to be on SSD.
Boot drives clones should not be the only place you backup/archive your sessions if they are on the boot drive. The sessions are presumably much more important than the OS and apps and plugins, all of which can be reinstalled.
But even for boot drive clones have multiple external drives and rotate between those. A likely time you will encounter a boot drive failure is when it is being read while making a backup or clone... at which point your boot drive is toast, and you've also likely just corrupted your only backup as well.
Like your other question about do you need a dedicated audio drive this has been discussed hundreds and hundreds of times on DUC and you can find all you need by searching DUC (use google search with a site:duc.avid.com qualifier).