Please recommend an external SSD drive for me

[paul_g]

I ordered my new iMac with a 2TiB SSD hoping the internal SSD drive could handle the throughput. I had two crashes tonight stating that PT was complaining about the drive being too slow when throwing some Waves plugin-s on some bass tracks.

So looks like I need to invest in an external drive just for audio PT Files. Can folks please recommend something for me? Budget is WIDE open... SSD, NVME (don't need RAID), it's all on the table as long as it's Thunderbolt.

Use Case: No HUGE studio sessions. We're talking light home studio stuff. Guitars, drums from EZ Drummer, Xpand for all synth stuff, bass tracks and some vox. Literally nothing heavy here. Please help!

Thank you! :)

[Bigbottomend]

I seriously doubt it's your drive speed. You can check your internal drive's speed with Blackmagic's free Disk Speed Test app (available on App Store.)

I have a 2017 version of the same Mac, which has a 1TB fusion drive (much slower than an SSD), and it works fine. It may be an issue with Catalina - some plugins don't function well on anything higher than Mojave. Unfortunately, I don't believe you can roll that machine back though.

To troubleshoot, I recommend you check how your session runs with as many tracks without plugins as you can throw at it, then check it with Avid plugins only inserted. Then move onto your Waves plugs. Also check with your plug in version to ensure that they are compatible with Catalina.

[Guy McDude]

Originally Posted by paul_g

I ordered my new iMac with a 2TiB SSD hoping the internal SSD drive could handle the throughput. I had two crashes tonight stating that PT was complaining about the drive being too slow when throwing some Waves plugin-s on some bass tracks.

So looks like I need to invest in an external drive just for audio PT Files. Can folks please recommend something for me? Budget is WIDE open... SSD, NVME (don't need RAID), it's all on the table as long as it's Thunderbolt.

Use Case: No HUGE studio sessions. We're talking light home studio stuff. Guitars, drums from EZ Drummer, Xpand for all synth stuff, bass tracks and some vox. Literally nothing heavy here. Please help!

Thank you! :)

Unless something has recently changed.
Im my 20 years using PT, Ive always been taught to never print to you system drive.

Your system and all your VIs are taxing your cpu, then youre asking it to record/play audio at the same time.


for external drives, Ive had good experience with something like this

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ...RoCl6sQAvD_BwE


good luck,
Sean

[Darryl Ramm]

Make sure your mac home drive is *not* shared on iCloud... that can totally cause IO issues.

And with disk errors double check that the sessions are really going to that internal ultra-fast SSD. You don't have say a USB flash stick attached to transfer files and are accidentally running the session of some of the files off that (oh so easy to accidentally do).

It is absolutely not your internal SSD. And even the fastest external PCIe/NVMe/Thunderbolt 3 SSD will only give you about the same actual performance as the internal SSD. And you should have disk caceh enabled (set to a size not normal) so many disk performance issues are moot anyhow.

Ignore the error message details and work though standard troubleshooting, starting with trashing prefs and testing with all .aaxplugin files moved out of the plugin folder (and trash prefs again and then start Pro Tools and it will automagically put back the default plugins). Just see if that works at all stably. Troubleshooting 101: always trash prefs, always suspect plugins (even when Pro Tools lies to you about issues)... so start by trying to prove/disprove plugins are an issue here.

What sample rate and IO buffer size are you working at? Since I see UAD stuff in your signature... make sure you are not accidentally running UAD plugins in Pro Tools at smaller IO buffer sizes.

Recheck all Pro Tools optimizations. Make sure every last one is done however inconvenient for now.

Make sure ignore errors is *not* checked while you troubleshoot.

If still stuck test other sessions and/or try starting with a totally empty session just in case you have a corrupted session.

Still stuck create a new admin user and test from there, repeating past tests.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Guy McDude

Unless something has recently changed.
Im my 20 years using PT, Ive always been taught to never print to you system drive.

The OP did not mention printing anything.

A lot has changed in the last large part of a decade. ultra-fast PCIe/NVMe based SSDs on one hand and Pro Tools disk cache on the other (but don't rely on disk cache alone on slow drives). Which make all past advice about separate disks irrelevent, and worse in many cases people who still believe they need to follow this confused advice will end up with a worse performing storage than if they used the internal ultra fast PCIe/NVMe SSD. And your advice is an example of that, suggesting giving up that ultra-fast internal PCIe/NVMe SSD for a slow old clunky SATA HDD. Dear God no. You likely just reduced IO performance by factors of several or more.

There are many hundreds of threads all over DUC explaining this in lots of details, going back many years. Please stop repeating stuff that is many years our of data,

[paul_g]

Darryl is correct. No issues up until tonight and I think I know what happened. I wanted to open an unfinished project from an old iMac and Drive that doesn't exist any more. To try to fix this, I tried to remove / clear unused audio files. That's when things got hairy.

I started getting the drive errors, trying to find and relink, and then I got the HD is not an audio drive.

I reset the HD as the audio drive. I've backed up everything. Now I'm going to create a new session and only import what I need. That's what I should have done in the first place.

Darryl is right the I/O Bus speed and internal SSD hard wired to that bus is faster than any external drive. I'm a performance NAS/Private Cloud Engineer for a large vendor, so I know a think or two about IOPS and GB/ps performance builds.

Considering I came off a 2007 iMac to this machine, and the file I'm working with is 10 years old (yeah I know), it's not the machine. I should have imported the wave files and not tried to work off an old session... my fault.

Thank you all. I think I'll still invest in a nice external SSD for backup and tiering though.

Darryl... as usual... You are a beacon of hope.. Thank you.

[orvillej]

While we're talking about discs, could you explain the disc cache setting? I've always left it set to normal. Should it be higher? If so, how much higher? Thanks for any input, this is a thing I've never truly understood.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by orvillej

While we're talking about discs, could you explain the disc cache setting? I've always left it set to normal. Should it be higher? If so, how much higher? Thanks for any input, this is a thing I've never truly understood.

This is not clearly explained and trips up folks. So a good question.

"Normal" is more how Pro Tools has worked before. For aggressive disk caching you want to set the disk cache to a numeric size. You might be able to guesstimate the size based on the files and then just load the session watching the System Usage>Disk Cache meter. The meter turns green when everything is loaded into disk cache. And you want some extra free space left over Say another 50%-100% depending on what you are doing. For some systems on the flakier side you may have to actually watch the disk cache meter until it goes green and then start working...

The disk cache memory is taken away from other memory, so if you are working with lots of VIs or just low on memory don't get crazy allocating a lot of memory to disk cache... or add more physical memory if you can.

There can be a lot going on Pro Tools systems, audio file IO, maybe VI samples pre-loading into memory, maybe other VI samples streaming, writing out session files etc.. Disk cache does not affect VI sample IO, just the audio files in the session. The combination of a fast PCIe/NVMe SSD and disk cache can be amazing with how fast large sessions start up and how reliably they run.

[Ben Jenssen]

Originally Posted by paul_g

I had two crashes tonight stating that PT was complaining about the drive being too slow when throwing some Waves plugin-s on some bass tracks.

This.
I've been having some -9173 errors lately, and I'm suspecting waves plugins are involved in my case. So, I have no factual basis for suggesting this, but you should check if it happens on sesssions without waves plugs.

[Emi]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

This is not clearly explained and trips up folks. So a good question.

"Normal" is more how Pro Tools has worked before. For aggressive disk caching you want to set the disk cache to a numeric size. You might be able to guesstimate the size based on the files and then just load the session watching the System Usage>Disk Cache meter. The meter turns green when everything is loaded into disk cache. And you want some extra free space left over Say another 50%-100% depending on what you are doing. For some systems on the flakier side you may have to actually watch the disk cache meter until it goes green and then start working...

The disk cache memory is taken away from other memory, so if you are working with lots of VIs or just low on memory don't get crazy allocating a lot of memory to disk cache... or add more physical memory if you can.

There can be a lot going on Pro Tools systems, audio file IO, maybe VI samples pre-loading into memory, maybe other VI samples streaming, writing out session files etc.. Disk cache does not affect VI sample IO, just the audio files in the session. The combination of a fast PCIe/NVMe SSD and disk cache can be amazing with how fast large sessions start up and how reliably they run.

Darryl, the doubt I have about disc cache: if o allocate only 1gb and the session has more, let’s say 3-4 Gb, does the disc cache buffers audio along the way or it only caches 1 gb and the rest doesn’t? If it caches as the session is being played can this produce errors?

Thanks