Where to record audio files to

[The Weed]

On a new custom build, please get at least a 500 GB NVMe M.2 drive. Way faster than a SATA SSD. A second one for sessions is not necessary, but as albee said, better for backing up and failure. I've got a 9-year-old audio computer and went from spinner to SATA SSD to NVme M.2. You should too. Samsung Evo 970 Plus here.

[Darryl Ramm]

Yes, yikes don't buy SATA drives in this day and age. They are several times slower than a M.2 PCIe/NVMe drive for about the same price (some M.2 drives are SATA, you don't want them). Most modern motherboards have M.2 PCIe/NVMe slots or you can add an adapter card in a PCIe slot.

And on a new PC build you have the opportunity to try to get PCIe 4 slots and M.2 card slots to take advantage of today's PCIe 4/NVMe M.2 drives. And there is a new generation of those just being released lead by the Samsung 990 Pro (which I'd hold out for if building a new PC).

And in general "SSD drives" constitute a broad range of stuff from garbage to high end, high quality drives. You should be focusing on specific models like the Samsung 990 Pro or WD Black SN850 or SN850X (all PCIe 4 M.2 cards). Or if you have to go old slow SATA something like a Samsung 870 Evo.

Don't get individual tiny SSDs, it's better to have the flexibility to just move stuff around, add partitions if you need multiple partitions on a drive (e.g. to support having multiple windows bootable installs or to simplify backup management). The smallest capacity SSDs can also have lower performance than their larger sizes of the same model. Personally given how low cost these prices are for massive performance I'd be putting several 2TB drives in a new PC. Space for testing, backup boot partitions, samples, etc.

Pro Tools also has disk cache which you can enable (i.e. set to s size not "normal") gets you fast performance on just about any drive. If running on SATA PCIe I'd be enabling that large enough to cache the entire session.

And sessions don't _need_ this drive performance, but fast drives tend to noticeably speed up lots of stuff, systems booting, Pro Tools starting up, better VI sample streaming, faster backups, etc. Modern M.2 NVMe drives are just so gobsmacking fast and at reasonable cost.

And given current consumer M.2 NVMe drives are in the 5/7 GB/s R/W speed (in a PCIe 4 slot) you should have no trouble at all running video files off a boot drive if you want to do that. I have no clue about Media Composer, but if Avid has kept disk recommendations for Media Composer as badly out of date as they have for Pro Tools then anything written is meaningless.