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Old 12-05-2020, 09:51 AM
hirundos hirundos is offline
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Default Always External Drive?

I have a new iMac on order (5K, 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD drive), and am considering revamping my file management/workflow...

I currently work on 4-5 projects a week, mostly podcasts, and some of them are sessions that live on (and collaborate through) google file stream, and I'm currently on a late 2015 iMac. They aren't huge sessions...they range from small to med-large. I have an external hard drive that is being used as GFS's cache and it is also where I keep my sessions in general, when not on GFS (which is a more recent workflow change). I do almost zero recording on a day-to-day basis, and just need to work quickly in Pro Tools and iZotope RX. The faster I can bounce and process files, the more projects I can take on! My current external hard drive, in combo with GFS, gives me errors in PT lately, as I have a feeling it is getting fragmented. But also, I don't have an automatic backup of these sessions...I end up manually backing them on to the internal drive and running Time Machine (separate hard drive).

So, my question is...should I still be putting my PT sessions on an external drive, which will have to be non-SSD because it'll be higher-capacity, so slower than my internal SSD drive? If I keep my sessions internal, I can run Time Machine backups nightly without missing a beat. I will be buying a new external drive anyways, but I'd rather have it as just a backup, or backup + GFS cache. Otherwise, I'll partition it into both a backup and a work drive. I'm just wondering if I even need a work drive anymore since internal drives and RAM have come a long way since the initial PT guidelines were established. I'm pretty old school...using PT for close to 20 years and I tend to subscribe to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix (or update) it".

Also seeking recommendations for a QUIET HHD...6 or 8 TB. The OWC Mercury Elite Pro make a huge racket. My Buffalo drive is a bit quieter, but it has a wonky connector, so will avoid buying another.
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Old 12-05-2020, 10:07 AM
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

I'd be expecting that internal 2tb to be fast, and the best place to put just about everything, but it depends on the drive.
Free disk speed test software for mac:
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on the Mac App Store

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Old 12-05-2020, 10:23 AM
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albee1952 albee1952 is offline
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

'The old rule(or is that guideline) was not about external drives, it was about separate drives for system and sessions(and as sample-based virtual instruments got bigger and better, a 3rd drive was recommended for sample libraries). It was based on performance of spinning drives of the day. Modern SSD are much faster, so you are probably going to be fine with everything on your 2TB SSD.

I'm not a Mac user, so take my advice with a grain of salt when I suggest you might think about how you want to delegate the drive space you have. For example, I might consider partitioning your 2TB into a 500GB portion for system and the rest for sessions. If you have sample libraries to consider, then I might divide the drive in half. This would keep the system drive at a size that's easier to backup, and easier to recover. But I would also bow to a Mac user's advice over mine on this bit
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Old 12-05-2020, 10:37 AM
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Ben Jenssen Ben Jenssen is offline
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

Quote:
Originally Posted by albee1952 View Post
'The old rule(or is that guideline) was not about external drives, it was about separate drives for system and sessions(and as sample-based virtual instruments got bigger and better, a 3rd drive was recommended for sample libraries). It was based on performance of spinning drives of the day. Modern SSD are much faster, so you are probably going to be fine with everything on your 2TB SSD.
Yep.
Quote:
Originally Posted by albee1952 View Post
I'm not a Mac user, so take my advice with a grain of salt when I suggest you might think about how you want to delegate the drive space you have. For example, I might consider partitioning your 2TB into a 500GB portion for system and the rest for sessions. If you have sample libraries to consider, then I might divide the drive in half. This would keep the system drive at a size that's easier to backup, and easier to recover. But I would also bow to a Mac user's advice over mine on this bit
Modern macs w/SSDs now have the benefit of Apple's new file system APFS, and one of its most obvious features is that partitions "share free space". That means you can partition a disk, to make it behave like two or more (and it's quicker and easier than before) but you don't actually have to set their sizes! They can grow and diminish individually as long as there is space left on the physical drive! So if you partition or not is more a question of organization, backup strategies and such. More than before. And gives you more elbow room.
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Old 12-05-2020, 11:38 AM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

Quote:
Originally Posted by hirundos View Post
I have an external hard drive that is being used as GFS's cache and it is also where I keep my sessions in general, when not on GFS (which is a more recent workflow change).
I hope you are careful to copy sessions out of Google Drive to local storage before working on them.

Quote:
I do almost zero recording on a day-to-day basis, and just need to work quickly in Pro Tools and iZotope RX. The faster I can bounce and process files, the more projects I can take on! My current external hard drive, in combo with GFS, gives me errors in PT lately, as I have a feeling it is getting fragmented. But also, I don't have an automatic backup of these sessions...I end up manually backing them on to the internal drive and running Time Machine (separate hard drive).
Not sure what you are after here, but you give no specs about any of these drives, or what exact errors you are getting. And I'm not sure why you mention backups. I hope you are not only relying on Time machine for system drive backup. Most errors I see with Google Drive or other cloud storage is people not realizing they should not be running Pro Tools at all on the actual content on a cloud shared volume.

"Feeling its getting fragmented"... fragmentation is rarely an issue, but even if it is you should ideally be running with disk cache (set to a size to fully cache the session, not "standard") which will make this and may other IO performance problems a non-issue.

Quote:
So, my question is...should I still be putting my PT sessions on an external drive, which will have to be non-SSD because it'll be higher-capacity, so slower than my internal SSD drive?
I don't follow the logic here. First as others have said the fastest drive you are likely to have is the internal SSD, it will never be a slow old external HDD which can be orders of magnitude slower. You can just put everything on the internal SSD. I would not partition/use APFS containers there unless you need to install multiple different operating systems.

If you did need an external SSD for sessions, the reason would normally be the internal boot/system drive is just too small, and in that case you would buy an external SSD not a slow old HDD. Even if a HDD is larger or cheaper why would you buy that for actual audio work? The only thing that a HDD really makes sense for most audio/DAW work today is archive/backup, or very large sample libraries or large video storage. But even for large sample libraries SSDs are often a practical choice.

And "SSD" is not very specific. For modern Mac systems if I had to work with an external drive (because of lack of internal SSD space) I would use a Thunderbolt 3 NVMe/PCIe SSD, a Samsung X5 is one example, that gives about the same performance as the PCIe/NVMe SSD inside a modern Mac. ... I would not use a SATA SSD, not any form of USB connected SSD. The extra performance of NVMe/PCIe over SATA give faster startup, disk cache load, VI sample load, backups, etc. and is typically good enough to let combinations of boot, samples and sessions reside on the same drive, whether that is internal or external makes no difference.

Quote:
If I keep my sessions internal, I can run Time Machine backups nightly without missing a beat.
Uh oh so it does sound like you are using time machine to back up the entire boot volume. If you have sessions on an external drive you can back them up using time machine if you want to.

For backing up the actual boot drive itself Carbon Copy Cloner is often a better choice, it gets you back up and running from a clone as fast as you can reboot the computer. Time machine can be a nice way to backup sessions but even for that personally I'd avoid time machine and just manually or use a script to backup session folders.

Those backups should be made to multiple different places, ideally in most cases physically removed from the system , maybe backup to a NAS server and/or other cloud storage. I would not back up to an external drive that is always physically connected... since user errors are the leading cause of data loss you ideally want the backup physically removed and untouchable, and you should have multiple (at least three copies, ideally in different formats/locations). Multiple copies including because the common time to discover you have a trashed filesystem or drive is while trying to back up from it... in which case the backup you were just writing may now be trash as well.

Quote:
I will be buying a new external drive anyways, but I'd rather have it as just a backup, or backup + GFS cache. Otherwise, I'll partition it into both a backup and a work drive. I'm just wondering if I even need a work drive anymore since internal drives and RAM have come a long way since the initial PT guidelines were established. I'm pretty old school...using PT for close to 20 years and I tend to subscribe to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix (or update) it".
Uh oh sound like you are leaving your backup drive attached to the computer. Not a great idea. Especially if you only have one backup drive. At least unmount/eject that volume while not backing up to it.

SSDs can be useful backup drives because they are fast... e.g with a clone on say a (fast PCIe/NVMe) Samsung X5 you can boot the iMac from that clone and be up and running and not notice any degradation in performance compared to the internal PCIe/NVMe SSD. But it's probably better that longer term backups and archives to be on a reliable/long term stable HDD vs an SSD. I have no advice there except given Seagate's horrible reputation for Rosewood drive reliability I'd be avoiding their products (that especially includes Lacie branded HDDs where you pay more for the overpriced pretty looking package containing crapy drives).

Last edited by Darryl Ramm; 12-05-2020 at 04:47 PM.
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Old 12-10-2020, 08:53 AM
hirundos hirundos is offline
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben Jenssen View Post
Yep.

Modern macs w/SSDs now have the benefit of Apple's new file system APFS, and one of its most obvious features is that partitions "share free space". That means you can partition a disk, to make it behave like two or more (and it's quicker and easier than before) but you don't actually have to set their sizes! They can grow and diminish individually as long as there is space left on the physical drive! So if you partition or not is more a question of organization, backup strategies and such. More than before. And gives you more elbow room.
Interesting! So on my new iMac I could easily allocate, say 500GB, to a partition (or APFS volume, they call this specifically?) to store my sessions, and the rest for my boot disk...and this creates the separation needed. Or maybe this isn't necessary? I think I need another cup of coffee before I tackle this thought puzzle experiment...


I think I will start using Carbon Copy Cloner, as I am not a fan of Time Machine. It was what was already set up on this "in between" computer that I'm currently on.
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Old 12-10-2020, 09:14 AM
hirundos hirundos is offline
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm View Post
I hope you are careful to copy sessions out of Google Drive to local storage before working on them.



Not sure what you are after here, but you give no specs about any of these drives, or what exact errors you are getting. And I'm not sure why you mention backups. I hope you are not only relying on Time machine for system drive backup. Most errors I see with Google Drive or other cloud storage is people not realizing they should not be running Pro Tools at all on the actual content on a cloud shared volume.

"Feeling its getting fragmented"... fragmentation is rarely an issue, but even if it is you should ideally be running with disk cache (set to a size to fully cache the session, not "standard") which will make this and may other IO performance problems a non-issue.



I don't follow the logic here. First as others have said the fastest drive you are likely to have is the internal SSD, it will never be a slow old external HDD which can be orders of magnitude slower. You can just put everything on the internal SSD. I would not partition/use APFS containers there unless you need to install multiple different operating systems.

If you did need an external SSD for sessions, the reason would normally be the internal boot/system drive is just too small, and in that case you would buy an external SSD not a slow old HDD. Even if a HDD is larger or cheaper why would you buy that for actual audio work? The only thing that a HDD really makes sense for most audio/DAW work today is archive/backup, or very large sample libraries or large video storage. But even for large sample libraries SSDs are often a practical choice.

And "SSD" is not very specific. For modern Mac systems if I had to work with an external drive (because of lack of internal SSD space) I would use a Thunderbolt 3 NVMe/PCIe SSD, a Samsung X5 is one example, that gives about the same performance as the PCIe/NVMe SSD inside a modern Mac. ... I would not use a SATA SSD, not any form of USB connected SSD. The extra performance of NVMe/PCIe over SATA give faster startup, disk cache load, VI sample load, backups, etc. and is typically good enough to let combinations of boot, samples and sessions reside on the same drive, whether that is internal or external makes no difference.



Uh oh so it does sound like you are using time machine to back up the entire boot volume. If you have sessions on an external drive you can back them up using time machine if you want to.

For backing up the actual boot drive itself Carbon Copy Cloner is often a better choice, it gets you back up and running from a clone as fast as you can reboot the computer. Time machine can be a nice way to backup sessions but even for that personally I'd avoid time machine and just manually or use a script to backup session folders.

Those backups should be made to multiple different places, ideally in most cases physically removed from the system , maybe backup to a NAS server and/or other cloud storage. I would not back up to an external drive that is always physically connected... since user errors are the leading cause of data loss you ideally want the backup physically removed and untouchable, and you should have multiple (at least three copies, ideally in different formats/locations). Multiple copies including because the common time to discover you have a trashed filesystem or drive is while trying to back up from it... in which case the backup you were just writing may now be trash as well.



Uh oh sound like you are leaving your backup drive attached to the computer. Not a great idea. Especially if you only have one backup drive. At least unmount/eject that volume while not backing up to it.

SSDs can be useful backup drives because they are fast... e.g with a clone on say a (fast PCIe/NVMe) Samsung X5 you can boot the iMac from that clone and be up and running and not notice any degradation in performance compared to the internal PCIe/NVMe SSD. But it's probably better that longer term backups and archives to be on a reliable/long term stable HDD vs an SSD. I have no advice there except given Seagate's horrible reputation for Rosewood drive reliability I'd be avoiding their products (that especially includes Lacie branded HDDs where you pay more for the overpriced pretty looking package containing crapy drives).
A lot to comb through here! Thank you for all the info. Very helpful. I think I have figured out what to do now... Since I have a large, fast internal drive, I will keep everything on there. And I will get a new external drive to do backups onto, probably via CCC. I haven't used it in years, but had luck with it in the past with creating clones of my drive. Nice to see they have turned it into a very useful backup tool.

Since I want something reliable for backup/archive, HDD should be the way to go, right? If I don't plan to use it as an audio drive, do I need the 7200RPM? I have that currently and I assume they run louder and hotter than 5400RPM. Though if I plan to have a bootable backup, maybe 7200RPM is better... I think unmounting when not backing up will solve the "I can't stand to listen to the platters spinning and writing" problem...or I will have to create a sound-proofed box for it, haha. I have a tiny office space!
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Old 12-10-2020, 09:29 AM
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JFreak JFreak is offline
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

The current PCI-express based SSD's are so fast you can safely forget the old "rule" of having sessions on different drive. Perfectly okay to have them on system drive.

The "rule" of today is keep your sample libraries on separate drive(s).
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Old 12-10-2020, 10:12 AM
hirundos hirundos is offline
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

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Originally Posted by JFreak View Post
The current PCI-express based SSD's are so fast you can safely forget the old "rule" of having sessions on different drive. Perfectly okay to have them on system drive.

The "rule" of today is keep your sample libraries on separate drive(s).
Ok, that's what I figured. Thank you! I don't have a ton of sample libraries at the moment, but I am looking to have that grow more over the next year or so, so I'd like to be forward-compatible and already set up for that. Do you think creating a separate APFS volume on the internal drive would suffice for sample libraries?
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Old 12-10-2020, 10:15 AM
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Default Re: Always External Drive?

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Originally Posted by hirundos View Post
Ok, that's what I figured. Thank you! I don't have a ton of sample libraries at the moment, but I am looking to have that grow more over the next year or so, so I'd like to be forward-compatible and already set up for that. Do you think creating a separate APFS volume on the internal drive would suffice for sample libraries?
APFS cannot beat laws of physics, it only allows flexibility in organising your files. Samples need to be on separate physical drive, but it can be slower USB3-connected drive if you don't have so many/large libraries. Though you do not need to do this until you face performance problems.
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