Im reinstalling with different hard drives and I know the usual ideas[20 year user] but I know tech changes and I wonder if anyone has any advise on my situation.
I have an AMD5 system, Ryzen 5 9600X, B650 board and now with 3 drives
1TB 970 EVO Plus
2TB 990 Evo
1TB WD10EZEX SATA III HDD
Im putting the OS and Cubase 15 on a SDD and Eastwest Opus/ Drums/ other samples on the other SDD
Traditional mixes with Live instruments{vox guit bass kazoo } +samples. My question is should I put my Cubase Project files on the HDD to avoid bottlenecks or is it actually faster for load times etc to put the Project files{including the audio} on one of the SDD drives anyway?
My reasoning is: even though its better to have the 3 separate{OS Cubase/ Project audio/Samples} - Does the speed of the SDD negate those factors?
Unless your project files are huge (< 1 gigabyte) then a HDD should be fine. My average project file size is around 30megabytes, takes just milliseconds to read off the disk. Then Cubase takes 2 minutes loading all the instruments, samples, and plugins.
I use an almost identical disk configuration, set up as follows:
1TB SSD: divided into two equal-sized partitions:
C: system and applications
D: all user files, including Cubase projects
2TB SSD: one partition for samples, libraries etc. that do not need to be backed up
SATA HDD: disk image backups of the system/user disk only which get copied to an offline USB drive and NAS.
My logic is that I can do a single image backup the entire system/user disk (including the partition configuration) to the HDD in order to be able to restore quickly by simply replacing that SSD and restoring that one image backup.
I use Terabyte Unlimited Image for Windows for disk image backups, but you can use an product that will take an image of the complete disk with all partitions. Whatās important is to design a restore strategy (and not just a ābackupā strategy) and then test the restores.
Based on common benchmarks, the loading times for a small (30 MB) Cubase project are approximately:
HDD: 0.20 to 0.30 s
SATA SSD: 0.06 s
NVMe SSD: 0.004 s
As @Googly_Smythe already mentioned, these are virtually indistinguishable durations. The situation is, of course, different when transferring larger amounts of data, like big project with many audio tracks or sound libraries.
The choice for HDD vs SSD for projects is completely dependent on number of recorded audio tracks playing. An exact limit is hard to pin down, but above 100 playing audio tracks a SSD might be needed.
Yep, I still had an HDD on my old computer two years ago, but the new system is M2 only (plus one older SATA SSD). Spinning disks are for backups (external USB)ā¦
I have my Cubase projects and all my samples on my data SSD. No issues at all. I donāt use dozens of massive orchestral libraries though, just āregularā stuff like pianos, organs and such.
Hi Britemode,
In my pc I use M2 ssdās, Crucial T705, read/write 13.600/10.200/MB per second.
So you have to look how fast they are.
C;\ = 1tb Crucial T705, Windows 11 and Steinberg software
D:\ = Asus Hyper Card M.2 x16 gen 5 card (8x4x4) with
3 x 4 TB Crucial T705 pcie 5.0x4 in Raid0 configuration,
containing all my sound libraries.
E:\Asus AS1000, 1TB, projects
} +samples. My question is should I put my Cubase Project files on the HDD to avoid bottlenecks or is it actually faster for load times etc to put the Project files{including the audio} on one of the SDD drives anyway?