[Darryl Ramm]

Hard drives largely belong in museums, or used for archives. Why are you not looking at solid state drives?

Why are you not providing any information about your system? You use exactly what Make/model external Glyph? What exact external connections do you have available? USB 2, USB3.1 Gen 2, FireWire 800, Thunderbolt? Thunderbolt 3... How are we expected to guess? What exact internal drives (Make/model/spec) including the boot drive do you have? If you have internal space for drives you might be better installing a drive there, or upgrading existing drives, it all depends... on all the info you are not providing,

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...

What exact variant and version of Pro Tools do you have? Disk Cache in newer versions hides lots of storage sins.

A super fast M.2 PCIe/NVMe SSD is not much more expensive than a slower SATA SSD, and both are way faster than any HDD. If you have Thunderbolt 3 then external PCIe/NVMe SSDs are an option. But may be overkill for samples... but I would def. look at SSDs if working on a laptop that is getting moved around.

How big are these new samples? How big are your current sample libraries?

And to be clear you have to install the plugin software on the boot drive in the normal place, you can install the samples that come with that software elsewhere.

All drives fail. Including drives you backup to. A good SSD, especially on a laptop that is moved around will likely give better reliability than a HDD. But plan on them all failing, you need to be prepared with backups and session archives. Multiple of them, stored in multiple locations, Ideally on different media/formats. Including session archives made to cloud storage or offsite drives. It is not always easy to pick brands for reliability, but Lacie is owned by Seagate, and Seagate consumer drives have well earned their current bad reputation for drive reliability. And it’s largely consumer drives we are talking about here being used by any manufacturer regardless of how fancy it is packaged. If using a HDD I would look for something using a WD Black drive.

As for “making partitions” The worst place to put your samples would be on the same slow old HDD as your audio sessions. And partitioning that drive would just make performance worse.

What is "affordable" do you a budget? ... but unless you are already backing up the system onto multiple other HDD (and maybe soem SSD) I would also include purchasing more backup/archive media (or do that before buying more plugins).