does pro tools work with onboard ssd

[bonzerboy]

I might want to build a computer in the near future. How is pro tools with windows 10 and is it working with SSD that are mounted on the mother board ?

[Top Jimmy]

Pro Tools 12 is running fine on 10 and while I don't have first-hand experience, there shouldn't be any reason why an M.2 SSD would be a problem.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by bonzerboy

I might want to build a computer in the near future. How is pro tools with windows 10 and is it working with SSD that are mounted on the mother board ?

What SSD exactly. Exact make/model. For example "M.2" SSDs vary between slow SATA drives, to 2 x PCIe 2.0, to the latest 4 x PCIe 3.0 NVMe. And performance differs *greatly* between brands/models. Samsung 950 Pro(which is 4 x PCIe NVMe) would be my starting (and finish) point for current consumer M.2 drives. You need to make sure the motherboard supports 4 x PCIe to the M.2 slot and the computer supports NVMe boot. And the next issue is cooling, these drives need to be properly cooled or they will throttle under heavy IO load.

The performance of these 950Pro drives should be enough for most people to run everything (boot, audio and samples) off a single drive. Obviously capacity may require more than one drive. Either on second M.2 slots in the motherboard or in a PCIe slot to M.2 adapter card.

[bonzerboy]

Thanks for the feed back,, few things to think about

[JCBigler]

I am using a SATAIII SSD in M.2 format in my new Lenovo laptop. It works fine. It's the OEM version of the Samsung, a PM871 is the actual part number.

I have done a few simple test runs using the internal system SSD on this laptop and it works. Protools doesn't seem to complain (any more than it usually does anyway ).

But I'm still using my 7200RPM external USB3.0 hard drive to record and run sessions from. The new Samsung 960 Pro NVMe SSD are screaming fast, but also screaming expensive. I plan to get one eventually, but they are still over $300 for 512GB.

When you look at the write speeds of the SSD compared to how much audio you are writing to disk, you aren't even saturating a 7200RPM spinner. And the write speeds of even the slowest SSDs are several times faster than that.

32 tracks of 24-bit/48k audio write about 4.4MB per second. Compare that to the slowest SSDs which have a write speed of about 520MB per second. Your NVMe SSD, like the Samsung 960 Pro have write speeds of over 2,100 MB per second.

Western Digital and Crucial (Micron) have both recently start shipping SATAIII SSDs in M.2 form factor. I would trust either of those companies for long reliable life. Samsung seems to be the only company currently shipping SSDs in the NVMe format other than some high end boutique gaming products.

[Darryl Ramm]

Intel/Micron ship PCIe/NVMe M.2 SSDs like the 600P. But Samsung is current king of the hill with the 950 Pro... and the enterprise big-brothers of it. Toshiba/OCZ have the RD40. There is quite a lot of interest in M.2 drives in enterprise applications, it won't be all U.2/2.5" form factor.

Intel basically invented NVMe to support what became XPoint memory. So I hope to see Intel/Micron do more there with both NAND and XPoint with NVMe based controllers.