Organizing Hard Drives and OS on New Build

[milet22]

I am building a new system, upgrading a dual boot Win 7 (PT 10) + Win 10 (normal computer use).


I have two general questions.

1. Is it still recommended / wise to have two entirely separate installations of Win10 if I'm going to use the computer for running Pro Tools AND separately as a regular computer? It was a little annoying on my old system but I know there are lots of optimizations required for Pro Tools.
2. I have a 2TB NVMe drive and 4TB SATA HDD. Given that I would have two OSes, projects, and samples, what is the recommended way to distribute those items across the drives. I have seen NVMe use for boot drives, but I wasn't sure if it would be better to have projects on that drive instead.

Thanks!
Rob

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by milet22

Is it still recommended / wise to have two entirely separate installations of Win10 if I'm going to use the computer for running Pro Tools AND separately as a regular computer? It was a little annoying on my old system but I know there are lots of optimizations required for Pro Tools.

This is up to you. It likely has little to do with optimizing a system, you can optimize a system properly for Pro tools that is also used to do other things, optimizations rarely conflict... it's you more likely just don't want all the crap that might come from general use/installing other software to be able to mess up your production system. Wether you should go to this effort or not is not something others can really tell you, we have no idea what else you are doing, how critical the Pro Tools work is, how frequently you might need to reboot etc. That's all a soft judgment call for you to make.

I have a 2TB NVMe drive and 4TB SATA HDD. Given that I would have two OSes, projects, and samples, what is the recommended way to distribute those items across the drives. I have seen NVMe use for boot drives, but I wasn't sure if it would be better to have projects on that drive instead.

Why do you want to use a SATA drive for anything (besides a backup drive?)? Do you have lots of samples that have to go there? It's the last place I'd put a sessions, on modern systems they belong on an NVMe drives, including maybe the one you boot from. And samples, meh put them on NVMe as well if you can afford it. Will samples and sessions fit on your 2TB NVMe drive? If you are building a new system why not have everything on NVMe. Can be on one NVMe if they'll for, or multiple if not. Use a PCIe to NVMe adapter card if needed.

[milet22]

Thanks! It’s good to know the optimizations don’t conflict. As to other uses, I was thinking about processes that might be running in the background like backup software, Dropbox, etc. that could interfere. I can probably just drop those if I need to.

As to why I wanted to use SATA, it was just that I had it available and my total local file amounts exceed my 2TB NVMe capacity. I could buy a second NVMe drive down the road but for now I’m trying to figure how to store everything. Based on your feedback, I could do OS+active projects on NVMe, and samples+inactive projects on SATA (if I understood you correctly).