Q About CPU Usage and SSD Drive

[Cayce]

Getting to know PT over this past couple of months after the instability of the DAW I'd been using for years has been quite a nice adventure. It's got it's quirks, as they all do, but coming to appreciate the workflow, I'm settling in nicely. It does seem to be particularly finicky about CPU overload thresholds, so my pursuit for the moment is to optimize my system & practices to give it as much room to work as I can.

My question today is about SSDs and how putting one in the loop might help. Seems there are two factors in system overloads: one is the actual CPU usage, the other being data transfer rates from the drive, and there are alerts for each. But does one significantly effect the other? If I put an SSD in place of the external HD I'm using, will the increase in data transfer take some of the load off the processor as well, or are they totally separate operators?

Also, is there an advantage one way or the other to internal or external SSD configuration?

Thanks.

Cayce

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015)
4 GHz Intel Core i7
32 GB 1867 MHz DDR3
2TB Internal Fusion Drive
2 4TB External Drives with Mirrored Backups
2 External Monitors: 27" & 65"

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Cayce

Getting to know PT over this past couple of months after the instability of the DAW I'd been using for years has been quite a nice adventure. It's got it's quirks, as they all do, but coming to appreciate the workflow, I'm settling in nicely. It does seem to be particularly finicky about CPU overload thresholds, so my pursuit for the moment is to optimize my system & practices to give it as much room to work as I can.

My question today is about SSDs and how putting one in the loop might help. Seems there are two factors in system overloads: one is the actual CPU usage, the other being data transfer rates from the drive, and there are alerts for each. But does one significantly effect the other? If I put an SSD in place of the external HD I'm using, will the increase in data transfer take some of the load off the processor as well, or are they totally separate operators?

Also, is there an advantage one way or the other to internal or external SSD configuration?

Thanks.

Cayce

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015)
4 GHz Intel Core i7
32 GB 1867 MHz DDR3
2TB Internal Fusion Drive
2 4TB External Drives with Mirrored Backups
2 External Monitors: 27" & 65"

You want to know what will really help you out more than using an external ssd? Get rid of that Fusion drive that's your system drive. Open up the case and put in a true ssd fr the system drive. FD's are death to PT on about the same par as OSX El Crapitan.

Seriously.

Which of your eternal drives are you going to swap out for an ssd? Right now there are no affordable 4 TB ssd's. If you're going to swap out just one drive I'd start with the drive that hosts your samples. An ssd won't necessarily help out with the cpu load on a well-designed system. It will help with data transfer.

[hengus]

I upgraded my mac mini to an 500 ssd and 16g ram. I use a drobo thunderbolt external and have very few issues. I set my cache to about 12G in PT. The drobo works well as it also has an ssd cache. The main drives installed are just cheap 2TB ones.

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