I'm considering taking over my old personal work laptop for music, meaning mostly Fractal support and DAW/VST use. DAW is primarily Studio One, though I have old versions of some others. VSTs are the usual suspects -- Superior/EZ Drummer, NI, Waves, Plugin Alliance, plus a fair smattering of whatever. It's Windows 10 at the moment, might move up to Windows 11.
Thing is, as it stands, it's got a single 500G SSD, nowhere near enough room for all that. It has room for more drives though.
I'm thinking separate drives for system, apps, samples, and audio, or maybe combine system and apps.
Any thoughts on best practices here?
Thanks in advance.
For organizing your music production laptop:
System Drive: Use an SSD for the OS and system files (Windows 10/11).
Applications Drive: Another SSD for DAWs and apps like Studio One and VSTs.
Samples Drive: A larger SSD for fast access to samples from Superior Drummer, NI libraries, etc.
Audio/Projects Drive: An SSD or high-speed HDD for storing audio files and ongoing projects.
This setup ensures optimal performance, with fast load times and efficient handling of different data types.
Windows 11 is fine. Everyone will be forced up in time.
The build and peripherals are completely upto you and your needs.
What cpu/ram does your laptop have?
That will steer you on how long it will last.
As long as it's modular you can keep adding drives but as vst products grow more dependent on cpu speed, you end up painted into a corner.
I'm using win 11, 32gb ram, 2x 4tb m.2 drives. Nvidia graphics. It's quick for now.
Sample/data on the second drive although it's only for organization/failures. M.2drive speeds can handle all of it on one drive but if all is on one drive, it's a bear to recover.
I'm considering taking over my old personal work laptop for music, meaning mostly Fractal support and DAW/VST use. DAW is primarily Studio One, though I have old versions of some others. VSTs are the usual suspects -- Superior/EZ Drummer, NI, Waves, Plugin Alliance, plus a fair smattering of whatever. It's Windows 10 at the moment, might move up to Windows 11.
Thing is, as it stands, it's got a single 500G SSD, nowhere near enough room for all that. It has room for more drives though.
I'm thinking separate drives for system, apps, samples, and audio, or maybe combine system and apps.
Any thoughts on best practices here?
Thanks in advance.
I'm also running Win 11, just upgraded from 10 a few weeks ago.
I've always used separate drives for different purposes, like you describe. With the fast speed of drives these days, I don't know how important that is. But, I still do that.
I have a drive for OS and programs, one for audio, one for samples, one for data, and an external drive for backups. The "data" drive is the place I store anything related to something I create. I can always reinstall Windows and programs (although a hassle and time consuming), but I couldn't rewrite a song - not easily.
Keeping things safe ...
All of the internal drives are SSD and in removable bays. I have a disk duper I use to make copies of the SSDs for safety, about twice a month. I also have a robocopy script, run daily, that makes safety copies of files to the external backup drive as well as extra copies of the most valuable files (DAW files, lyrics, etc - those things I can't replace).