My OS and software are on a 2280 nvme 1TB drive. I’m thinking of installing a 2nd m.2 2242 drive in the wwan slot (it does work on my laptop) and putting my drum samples on that.
My question is, would this increase performance?
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From a basic tech perspective, yes. Offloading working data from the primary drive frees up capacity elsewhere in the system. From a more practical standpoint, it depends on the speed of the new drive, how the pcie lanes are divided on the chip set (a wifi slot might share bandwidth with the primary disk) and a whole host of other minor items (power draw, thermals, etc) that might aggregate into you not noticing any difference at all. That said, it’s generally a good idea to keep working files not only backed up, but on different physical media so that having to format your OS drive because of some wacky error doesn’t cost you what you’ve been working on. It’s far easier to swap a nvme drive to a different laptop than it is to try recovering the data if your disk controller fails
It’s a good idea for backups, and to prevent you from filling your root drive.
Speed wise it won’t change anything.
An nvme drive can handle 388 simultaneous uncompressed 192khz audio streams.
Unless you’re dealing with that many, it’s unlikely to be the issue.
You should do performance testing your roof while you’re using it to see what the actual bottleneck is.
If data speeds are the bottleneck, you may be better off moving the application to the new drive Aswell
Unless you’re dealing with that many, it’s unlikely to be the issue.You should do performance testing your roof while you’re using it to see what the actual bottleneck is.
Solid answer. To add some additional context:
- If you have enough RAM (which today is 16gb-64gb), there will be little to no I/O to the application/program files after the first playback of a session. All that program data will get saved to a disk cache in ram and probably will generate no additional I/O for the remainder of the session.
- If you have any audio tracks recorded from a mic or other audio input, these are the most likely source of high-throughput disk I/O during playback. And it’s these that you would want to isolate from your sample library. As noted, that impact might be little to none even for sizeable 64-track or 128-track projects running off an SSD. But if any change to disk layout matters, separating project audio from sample audio is near the top the list… much more so than separating programs from anything else.
- If OP is debugging unreliable playback or recording, that’s much more likely to be either bad latency configs or expensive plugins saturating the CPU. I’d be real surprised if the issue was disk I/O unless they’re working on like a 4G laptop that can’t cache anything in ram. But even there… it’s a ram problem manifesting as disk I/O. Latency settings can be complex to debug, but are a common source of gappy playback/recording when CPU, disk, and ram aren’t saturated.
These are good points. In truth I’m not experiencing any lag so it’s practically superfluous in terms of speed. But to have my samples and other files in a removable drive will serve as a backup and something I can swap between machines if I ever upgrade hardware or change OS.
It would improve performane, but not noticably. nvme is already really fast and as long as you don’t have heavy disk I/O from another program, your OS and DAW will only occupy a minimal amount of the avainle disk I/O. And drum samples are really small in size.
I put my Reaper projects and samples on a large capacity flash card made for HD cameras. That way, I can transfer my files, maintain performance, and not have a USB stick I could hit or damage.