SSD with External Drive: Newb Question

[Karma180]

Hi Karma here from way up north in Canada ... its been a very long while! And as usual, I have a goofy question and I'm not sure where to post it.

I plan to buy Pro Tools 2018 and I want to upgrade my laptop to one that has an SSD drive. My question is ... will I be storing sessions on the 256 SSD drive? That's not a lot of space for me so I will need to be able to access/incorporate my tera-byte external drives.

Will this be how it goes? I will have my eternal drive connected and just import sessions and record to the external drive via USB?

Thanks,
Karma

[Darryl Ramm]

What exact make/model laptop and what exact SSD does it have? Link to the best specs you can find online if that's easiest.

SSD performance varies by about an order of magnitude between different models/technology. Just saying "SSD" is like saying "car" and we don't know if you mean a Yugo or Porsche Turbo.

Wherever possible I would get a latpop with a 4 x PCIe 3.0/NVMe internal SSD (likely an M.2 card or may be soldered to the motherboard, but just M.2 does not tell you enough it must be PCIe and preferably NVMe) and use that for *everything*. Boot/system and audio/session files and samples if they will fit. It's worth it to not have to deal with external disks and cables, especially if this needs to be portable, and almost any external disk you get (except Thunderbolt 3/NVMe SSD) will be much slower and offer worse performance than running off the internal drive.

Yes I know the Pro Tools doc still says use a dedicated audio/session drive. All that doc here it's badly out of date and needs to be updated, hopefully Avid will get to that without me having to keep bugging them.

Upgrading the internal SSD or adding a *great* external SSD may all be options as well... depending on exactly what laptop.

[drumdude21]

I've gotten in the habit of moving the entire folder of a session over to my SSD, working and completing the project there, and then moving it back over to my 6TB external drive.

It seems like everything works better, but I'm not totally an expert on what the best route is.

[albee1952]

In addition to what's been said, a 256GB drive might seem like plenty, but I would go at least 500GB. I agree with the idea of moving sessions off to an external drive to keep local space open. If you don't have an external drive with you, then I would push the budget and go with a 1TB(probably a Samsung 8xx series)