WindcryMusic
Senior Member
I’m expecting to soon get a new DAW that will have a 4TB internal SSD system drive. My current DAW has a standard internal drive, so I have most of my sample libraries residing on a pair of Samsung T3 SSDs connected via USB. They aren’t the fastest things available, but they have worked pretty well. But now, with the expected new DAW, I am wondering if using the T3 drives is really going to be the way to go anymore, vs. just having those libraries sitting on the large system SSD.
I have long assumed that the major reason for keeping sample libraries apart from a system drive when it resides upon a standard platter-based drive is because of the performance penalties incurred every time the drive’s physical armature has to relocate to another region of the disk. But as far as I know, that shouldn’t be a problem with an SSD, since there’s no physical action required to reach a sector at the other end of the memory space, vs. the sector next door to the current one; I’d think the SSD performance should be the same regardless of at what address the next sector of data is located. So that leads me to believe that the additional intrinsic speed of the internal SSD as compared to those USB-connected T3 drives that I currently have might yield more of a performance gain overall than what I suspect to be the minimal penalty of not separating sample libraries from the system drive when an SSD is in use for this.
So please enlighten me … what am I missing, if anything? Are there other reasons to keep sample libraries separate from the system drive that I’m overlooking? And if there are, are those reasons impactful enough to make continuing to use the comparatively slow Samsung T3 USB drives for my sample libraries a better option than a large, much faster, internal SSD drive? Yes, the best case scenario would probably be to get a external enclosure for faster SSD external drives and run the sample libraries therein ... but I can only take on so much expense at one time.
(As far as the streaming of live audio tracks, that’s mostly a non-issue for my needs; on any given track there might be one or two live recorded audio tracks at most, and quite often none at all.)
I have long assumed that the major reason for keeping sample libraries apart from a system drive when it resides upon a standard platter-based drive is because of the performance penalties incurred every time the drive’s physical armature has to relocate to another region of the disk. But as far as I know, that shouldn’t be a problem with an SSD, since there’s no physical action required to reach a sector at the other end of the memory space, vs. the sector next door to the current one; I’d think the SSD performance should be the same regardless of at what address the next sector of data is located. So that leads me to believe that the additional intrinsic speed of the internal SSD as compared to those USB-connected T3 drives that I currently have might yield more of a performance gain overall than what I suspect to be the minimal penalty of not separating sample libraries from the system drive when an SSD is in use for this.
So please enlighten me … what am I missing, if anything? Are there other reasons to keep sample libraries separate from the system drive that I’m overlooking? And if there are, are those reasons impactful enough to make continuing to use the comparatively slow Samsung T3 USB drives for my sample libraries a better option than a large, much faster, internal SSD drive? Yes, the best case scenario would probably be to get a external enclosure for faster SSD external drives and run the sample libraries therein ... but I can only take on so much expense at one time.
(As far as the streaming of live audio tracks, that’s mostly a non-issue for my needs; on any given track there might be one or two live recorded audio tracks at most, and quite often none at all.)