I am running Cubase 8.5 on a five years old Dell XPS 17 and I am considering upgrading Cubase to 9.x and upgrading the laptop too. My current XPS 17 has two internal HDD’s (not solid state) and I assume that having two disk drives is the best way forward, i.e. one system/program drive and one data drive (.cpr, .wav, samples, etc.). The current laptops that can accommodate two internal drives are very expensive.
Does current technology (USB I presume) ensure a sufficiently fast response with an external SSD drive for data or must it be internal to perform well?
Any advice configuring a good laptop based Cubase setup will be much appreciated, thank you .
With SSD drive it’s not needed to have separate drive for your projects. SSDs are fast and have, what’s even more important, virtually zero access (seek) time. So my recommendation with laptop is just buy big enough SSD.
However I highly recommend to get a big external HD for archiving purposes. This way you can move your inactive projects (the ones you are not working with right now) to external drive instead of letting them to consume your valuable SSD space.
Jarno, thank you very much for your helpful reply. I will do as you suggest and buy a big SSD drive for both programs and data. And I already have, and use, an external 1TB drive for archiving purposes. I will definitely continue to use that. Thanks a lot!
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