[Darryl Ramm]

Can you please read the advice already written in this thread by somebody (me!) who actually understands what they are talking about. I've specifically replied to the OP about a specific system they are thinking of buying. That system has one or two super fast NVMe/PCIe internal drives that could be used here. External drives can sure be considered as well but not for performance reasons which you raise here.

Again. As I've already said in this thread. Most external drives will be _slower_ than the internal PCIe/NVMe SSDs. That includes all USB/SATA and USB/NVMe drives. And you won't practically install enough of them to make any meaningful drive speed here faster than just using the internal drives.... but here you go suggesting exactly what I've already pointed out will typically be slower.

You can get into the same performance ballpark as the internal SSD with external Thunderbolt 3/NVMe SSDs, but by that point the price (esp. with Samsung X5) or complexity (installing M.2 drives in carriers or expansion chassis) is probably not worth it for most users.

And on free space/performance... on sample drives or shared large drives that are almost all samples (or other content that is not written to) you can run them at quite low free space. Even if being written to a lot simple advice like 30% free makes less sense as drives get larger and larger and the bulk of the content is never written to, it can be better to think about how much stuff is "active" or hot on the drive, e.g. maybe sessions are taking 10 GB in total. And so you want a few 10GB of free/scratch space at least. And for a boot drive, well I'd want more, maybe 50-100GB spare, part of that is wanting the flexibility of having some test space if needing to install a new boot container.

Technical side comment: SSDs actually maintain invisible unused space for writing efficiency and long life. It's typically around 7% of the drive size. In days before everything supported TRIM and filesystem were not SSD optimized some of us would increase that.