m.2 PCIe SSD: better off as system drive or data drive?

[dvdr]

Quick question:
M.2 PCIe SSD Samsung 950 Pro and a "normal" Samsung 850 Pro in a Win10Pro/64GB RAM PT12-environment:
where is the M.2 better off and more important in terms of PT 12's demands and the high read&write speeds it can provide: as a system drive or as the data drive, where sessions are stored? VI-samples will have their own 1TB SSD...
Additionally: would you suggest 256GB or 512GB for the system drive?

[huzzam]

A faster system drive will speed up Pro Tools launch, inserting plugins & opening plugin GUIs, and system tasks like bootup & launching other apps. Think: general "snappiness."

A faster data drive will allow you to work with more tracks in higher bitrate sessions, with less risk of dropouts. Think: monster multitracking beast.

For most people, it's more important to have a fast data drive, as your audio sessions need to run in real time — if the drive falls behind in delivering the data, you get pops in your playback, or (worse) in your recordings. If your system drive is slow (which even your "normal" 850 Pro is definitely not), the worst that will happen is PT takes an extra second or two to launch.

(Just checked and both drives support Direct Memory Access (DMA), so neither should put a heavy load on the CPU during data transfers. This was my other consideration.)

Since VIs will have their own drive, 256gb should be way more than plenty for the system drive. My own system partition is only about 50gb, not including my user files. (For testing new OS versions, I've even gotten by with a 30gb system partition.) That said, I don't recommend stepping down to a 128gb drive (in case you were considering it) because often drives below 256gb have worse performance.

~peter in athens

[dvdr]

Thank you, Huzzam

I just was not sure, how much data/files are still "shuffled" back and forth on the system drive during operation, when there is a dedicated session drive and PT's options are set to use as much RAM as possible.

[Darryl Ramm]

Just use the M.2 drive as your boot drive *and* put audio/sessions on that as well. All possible with the raw speed of a modern 4xPCIe/NVMe drive. All this has been discussed oh in hundreds of other posts on DUC...

EDIT: and if you can fit them try putting samples on that drive as well.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Southsidemusic]

And a 256GB system drive is too small. Fills up quickly and if you wanna run rec sessions from the internal drive it needs to be atleast 512GB or bigger.