With SSDs becoming mainstream can pro tools now be on the main OS boot drive?

[DBK]

We all know with spinning hard drives it was advised to have pro tools sessions on a seperate hard drive. But I've heard countless time from reputable people now that with solid state drives that is no longer the case. I've heard this enough that I should just accept it but the OCD overthinking side of me still is skeptical about putting pro tools on my main Solid state drive, although this would be ideal for my drive situation.

I have 1 samsung evo 970 1Tb m.2 SSD and 1 samsung 970 evo 2TB drive.

What would be the ideal setup? I would prefer to have my operating system and pro tools on my main 1TB SSD and reserve all 2TB of the 2nd internal drive for my cpu/ram heavy sample libraries (eastwest, kontakt, UVI, etc..) but I can put Pro Tools sessions on either drive.

So which situation is optimal for performance. All drives are evo 970 m.2 SSDs

1. Having Pro Tools sessions run on my operating system drive with all of the applications and windows 10.

2. Having pro tools run alongside my sample libraries on my 2nd internal SSD.

3. (Only if necesarry) purchase a new SSD that will solely run pro tools sessions.

And while were at it, please explain to me why it's ok to have pro tools on an OS SSD now (if it is ok) so i can put this worrying to rest haha.

[Darryl Ramm]

All this has been on DUC already many times....

You can likely do whatever you want.

Things also are affected by use of disk cache, and wether VI samples stream or pre load.

[Lynn Gräber]

Yeah, why not. With NVME I dont even use Disk Cache anymore.

Welcome to the 2020's. haha

[musicman691]

Something to keep in mind is system maintenance. If you have your PT sessions on the same drives as your operating system and the drive fails you lose both the OS and sessions. Separate drives for OS and PT sessions alleviate that problem. Same for samples. For those reasons alone separate drives for os, PT session and samples might be a good thing.



Also keep in mind your backup strategy - you do have one right? You wouldn't necessarily need to have 3 separate drives but it wouldn't hurt.

[DBK]

Originally Posted by musicman691

Something to keep in mind is system maintenance. If you have your PT sessions on the same drives as your operating system and the drive fails you lose both the OS and sessions. Separate drives for OS and PT sessions alleviate that problem. Same for samples. For those reasons alone separate drives for os, PT session and samples might be a good thing.



Also keep in mind your backup strategy - you do have one right? You wouldn't necessarily need to have 3 separate drives but it wouldn't hurt.

Oh yah I definitely have backups that I haven't mentioned - I just expect most people assume everyone backs everything up as they should be haha.

Losing the sessions wouldn't be a big deal as I'll have everything backed up, and losing the OS would be the same whether or not PT is on that drive or not. So the OS is gone either way, and the sessions will be backed up regardless. So I don't think I'll really lose much more in 1 scenario to the next if that main drive goes down. In both cases I lose the OS, and in both cases I have the sessions backed up. I would lose whatever work I'd been doing for the last couple hours assuming I hadn't backed up though, so theres that I suppose.

[DBK]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

All this has been on DUC already many times....

You can likely do whatever you want.

Things also are affected by use of disk cache, and wether VI samples stream or pre load.

Any remembrance of what the thread was called? Would love to skim it.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by DBK

Any remembrance of what the thread was called? Would love to skim it.

google NVMe SSD boot samples site:duc.avid.com

542 results

google NVMe SSD "Darryl Ramm" site:duc.avid.com

1570 results

Using google search to search DUC is much better than the internal search.

Your questions also have no obvious deeper answers than just try it. We don't know if you are working the most complex huge post video sessions or doing massive VI work, with what VIs etc. And we have no idea what you mean by "performance", just Pro Tools not falling over (should not be a problem)? Session startup time? Session load into disk cache time? Sample load time? Ability to support massive streaming amount of VIs (should not be a problem). etc.

The simplest rule is that with NVMe drives none of the old rules apply, you can put everything on one drive, or in any combination of drives. Things like space needed for samples, planning for ease of backups etc. are more important than worrying about IO performance of the drives.

[DBK]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

google NVMe SSD boot samples site:duc.avid.com

542 results

google NVMe SSD "Darryl Ramm" site:duc.avid.com

1570 results

Using google search to search DUC is much better than the internal search.

Your questions also have no obvious deeper answers than just try it. We don't know if you are working the most complex huge post video sessions or doing massive VI work, with what VIs etc. And we have no idea what you mean by "performance", just Pro Tools not falling over (should not be a problem)? Session startup time? Session load into disk cache time? Sample load time? Ability to support massive streaming amount of VIs (should not be a problem). etc.

The simplest rule is that with NVMe drives none of the old rules apply, you can put everything on one drive, or in any combination of drives. Things like space needed for samples, planning for ease of backups etc. are more important than worrying about IO performance of the drives.

Thank you

[EGS]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

...Using google search to search DUC is much better than the internal search...

+1

[zion]

Originally Posted by Lynn Gräber

Yeah, why not. With NVME I dont even use Disk Cache anymore.

Welcome to the 2020's. haha

Same Here!