DAW Recording on Mac - Startup drive as storage drive in 2021

[andrewstadium]

Hello, It has been years since I did extensive DAW recording but back in the day, I was told to have my recording drive be separate from my OS and boot drive. Is this still a consideration with SSD Drives? Also, I used to get the advice with 7200 RPM drives go have smaller partitions to record. Is this still relevant?
I hope to put two Bootcamp Mac/Windows 10 partitions onto a 1TB SSD running in a Macbook Pro 2011 2.5 a friend gifted me.
Any help is greatly appreciated.

[The Scum]

I think a lot of that stuff is historical footnote at this point.

In the early DAW days, we were approaching the speed limits of what a hard drive could do, just for audio handling. And we were living with modest amounts of RAM, and the operating system would augment it with "virtual memory", using the hard disk to store things. We didn't want OS swapping to come anywhere near the audio.

We now have enough RAM to hold an entire session (or a significant portion of it) of audio without even needing to hit the disk in real time.

And the disks are much faster...SATA is screaming fast - though the wire is likely faster than the media behind it, the media isn't that far behind. Compared to audio rates, it's blazing. 24 tracks of 48K 32-bit data is 4.6 MB/sec. The now ancient SATA I is 150 MB/sec.

Solid state drives also don't have any mechanical contention to deal with - it doesn't take milliseconds just for the heads to pivot to the proper track. They do have to erase before they can write to an area of the disk, though...I'm not sure if that's a meaningful bottleneck.

There is some degree of convenience of having the audio on an independent volume - you can pull the drive to move it somewhere else.

(I've got some question as to how up to these specs a 10 year old Mac will be, though...)

I've successfully done 24 track sessions on my baby laptop (a 5 year old Dell XPS13 with 8 GB RAM) with an NVME SSD. Still have to disable the screensaver, and shut off wifi for reliable recording, though!

[Nick Sevilla]

I always recommend a separate drive for the work material.

Less stress on the buss master in the motherboard. Less traffic going to and from the system SSD.

Some people think it's ok. Until the SHTF.

[analogika]

I always recommend a separate drive for the work material.

Less stress on the buss master in the motherboard. Less traffic going to and from the system SSD.

Some people think it's ok. Until the SHTF.

This thinking makes sense when you consider computers modular builds where an S-ATA controller manages I/O, and the only difference is in how well the attached device saturates that bus, and how reliable it is.

I wonder, though: Does it really still apply to the way Apple (not sure if other manufacturers have followed suit) integrates the SSD storage directly into their system controller? It seems like those machines are evolving into a big sprawling mass of storage and throughput where speed considerations and bottlenecks become sort of abstract concepts; certainly when talking about the piddling bandwidth needed for anything audio…?

[alexdingley]

My 2021 thought process is:
• drives (Spinning or SSD) are cheaper than they’ve ever been (though not as cheap as they’ll be next year )
• On a Mac vs PC... no difference (specs aside), it certainly is a solid practice to keep things separated
• A system drive is equally likely to shit the bed as an audio drive (even SSD blades fail)... so why risk having all those eggs in the same basket?
• The internal nvme drives on most modern portables can definitely handle a DAW session, but storage is cheaper and more convenient/reliable than ever before, so for recording rigs that are stationary, I would ALWAYS use a secondary drive for audio.
• For location recordings, I track to my internal SSD, and then immediately backup to a USB stick / external drive (and the cloud via Backblaze - if there’s fast internet at the location) before leaving the venue... in case my vehicle and Mac don’t make it back to home base.

[digitaldrummer]

a couple notes....

having a separate boot drive can sometimes help just to make recovery easier. if the boot drive died, you could quickly replace it, re-install it, restore backup or even re-install OS and all apps, plugins, etc. and access the data drive again with sessions... You might even have one on standby? Is that faster than restoring everything on a single drive? It can be if you have a lot of session data. Making logical partitions doesn't really help anything other than organization. if the drive dies, all partitions go away..

Most SSDs don't have to erase every time they write. They usually have what is called "over-provisioning" (or spare), which is more NAND than the reported capacity. so when new data is written, it is not written to the exact same location as it is done on a rotating hard drive. There is a pool of "erased" blocks of NAND, and when one of those is written to, it can happen immediately. Actually, there is a DRAM buffer that is written to first - then it is moved almost immediately to the NAND (flash memory). Then the old block is marked as obsolete and erased (in the background) and moved to the free pool. This pool is constantly rotated (wear-leveling) to ensure that one cell doesn't get worn out before another (as they do have a finite life). The write performance of an SSD is usually way higher than a hard drive. The exception may be things like USB sticks or really really cheap SSDs that don't have DRAM or over-provisioning.

[roscoenyc]

Why even consider chancing it?

Hard drives are so inexpensive.
Every kind of hard drive.

[kslight]

I think it’s a better computing practice to use separate physical drives....ideally you’d have 3 drives even IMHO...system drive, audio drive, and at least one backup drive (configured to backup the other two drives via time machine is very simple to do).

Those old MacBooks can accept a second ssd internally in place of the dvd drive if you prefer to work internally.

I don’t think it’s necessary in non-professional situations from a performance standpoint, but I think working in the above fashion will reduce the chance of heartache when you experience a failure.

[analogika]

Statistical wrench in the works:

Having two drives multiplies the chances of having a drive failure. Especially if you factor in extra connectors and cabling as additional points of failure. (Anecdotal evidence: I've had more internal drive failures on production machines due to defective cabling than due to actual drive malfunction. Yes, one of those machines was a 2011 13" MacBook Pro.)

This obviously does not apply to fully redundant systems (e.g. recording to internal and external drives in parallel).

But I'm considering that traditional computing/recording wisdom may be in need of an update.

[digitaldrummer]

I used to have a separate boot drive and one for data. Those were 5400rpm hard drives and it made sense to me then. Now I have two SSDs (ok,3..). I use the boot drive for everything. It has no issues keeping up. The second drive then stores projects that I'm not currently working on, but may need access to again, or may continue work later. Then I also have a 3rd SSD (an m.2 NVMe) that I store samples on. I could easily store these on either of the other SSDs... but smoke em if you got em, right?

Then I have several more SATA SSDs and HDDs that I use for short term and longer term backups with an external USB3 dock. I use this and i rotate them and occasionally bring one to the house (vs. the separate studio). I have had to restore files before, and so far, nothing lost forever.

[vvv]

FWIW, PC (XP Pro) with all SATA here, two 5400 with a 7200 system drive (that I'm not sure runs that fast); I also have two USB2 hard drives hooked up and the macheen is fast enough to record the odd overdub to a project that was moved to one of those for storage.

So, system drive, work drive, and I back-up to a USB. Then, weekly or monthly ~ I copy to a unmastered and mastered mixes to a USB stick and transfer to a Win10 laptop which has a USB3 drive attached. About every 3 months I back up that USB3 drive to a second USB3 that, pre-covid, I kept at a remote location - now I gotta find a new remote place ...

[Recycled_Brains]

Why even consider chancing it?

Hard drives are so inexpensive.
Every kind of hard drive.

This.

Redundancy. Redundancy. Redundancy.

I back up to 2 external drives, and in-progress sessions get backed up to the system drive as well. I work from my primary external drive. I've just always done it that way and it's worked fine (for the most part).

God ain't making more land, but he IS making storage.

[CFB4]

Hi everyone!
My current experience/workflow is a good one. MacBook Pro connected to a Samsung T7. The T7 holds my projects and my sample libraries. So far all good. Since SSDs tend to go up in smoke with no warning, I back up to a Samsung T5 (and a secondary RAID archive on am ancient Mac Pro. All good with project track counts being between 4 and 100. Logic, Nuendo and Reaper.

[alexdingley]

Hi everyone!
(and a secondary RAID archive on am ancient Mac Pro)

Yep... Solid move! and now I am compelled to brag on my own similar rig: My Early 2009 8-core 2.26GHz Mac Pro tower has now become the household server. Since there's no need for an Optical drive in it anymore, I have dual 6TB drives RAID'd as a Media array in the top chamber, and 4x 8TB WD Reds strapped as a RAID for time-machine (running OS off of a PCIe sled'd SSD)... Can't say enough good things about using an old Mac as a network TimeMachine server (or whatever app you like for backup). All Macs in the house backup to the 32TB time machine volume in this tower + my mission-critical machines also backup to Backblaze.com. I also have a separate 8TB drive in a fire-safe... it comes out once per quarter (or after significant creative projects) for a stand-alone rsync backup of the studio machine and my personal digital media library.

So yeah — to the original poster. Please, for your own sanity's sake... use separate drives for system / audio. And backup everything! I live by the edict: "If data doesn't exist in 2-3 physically-unique locations, data does not exist"