I'm asking because I'm looking into assembling a new rig, and would ideally like to have a 240 SSD for my main operations, and a separate 1TB HD for all the space-intensive stuff such as RDs, RTs, MIDI instrument samples, etc.

I also noticed that there are many more installation paths with the BiaB VST (which, TBH, I have not even bothered with yet but probably will want to in the future when all the kinks are ironed out), and I'm worried that if everything is not installed in the exact same drive, there will be more opportunities for BiaB, which is already a notoriously fickle and buggy beast, to fail/crash/ect,.

In that vein, comments on my the proposed specs are very much welcome :-)

Motherboard: Intel B360, DDR4

CPU: i5-9600K

Memory: 1x16 G DDR4 2400Mhz (btw, I've seen comments on other music production forums claiming that 2X8 is better than 1x16 because of multi/hyper threading reasons which is then vigorously negated in other comments. Thoughts?).

Storage: 1 240 Gb SSD SATA III + 1 Tb HDD @ 7200 RPM

GPU: Stock/Internal

Thanks in advance!

Deacon

Deacon, I've had 2018 BIAB and prior versions run in this manner of hard drives. My SSD is the C:\ and the HDD is the D:\ drive. All RTs and drums are located on D:\BB and the program is on C:\BB. No issues at all with latency on the real tracks being on a slower disk.

In general I keep all my Win10 software and other apps on C:\ and all data files on D:\ since it's a much larger disk.

Thanks sslechta,

And do you currently use the BiaB VST as well?

Yes. I have two small SSDs. One is my boot drive; the other has the BIAB program. My RealTracks and RealDrums are on a separate Western Digital Black hard drive that runs at 10,000 rpm.

Thanks Matt,

Is there an appreciable difference between 7200 and 10,000 RPM?

I would say yes. But I don't see too many hard drives anymore that are available at that speed. Mine is almost five years old.

I do not. I tend to send the MIDI in BIAB over to the AirXpand!2 Virtual Synth that comes with Pro Tools (My main DAW).

I haven’t tried the VST Plugin since early testing. It does look like it’s getting pretty close to being solid, thanks to the hard work of many.

I doubt the VST will perform differently from the main program with respect to what kind of drive you use.

ON my DESKTOP both BB and RTs are are SAME non-boot, 6TB WD Black, 7200 RPM drive, and it's plenty fast enough. My DESKTOP has a 2TB SDD boot drive but I DO NOT install DAW's or any other "music apps" there (unless you count ilok and small overhead utilities like)


MY LAPTOP on the other hand only has a one 2TB NVMe SDD drive, so it's both Windows OS/Boot and by "unconscious design" is where everything else, including BB is installed.

However, interesting part, I keep RT's on a 256GB microSD card (a Samsung Evo that was on sale, still is, for around $45 at Amazon). The SD card interface sits on the motherboards USB 2 bus, not the much faster USB 3.1 bus. So the SD card interface is about as slow as you can go. Even with that, I can load up a song, full of RT's, hit play [first time] and it will be playing in a "few" seconds. Few is relative, to me a "few" (in this context) is less than 5-10 seconds - on average I'd say more like things get playing in under 5'ish seconds.

EDIT

ALMOST Forgot: load times are ALSO "fast" enough.

End EDIT

"Lighting fast" (milliseconds) RT loads are NOT required by be me - of course neither is a 64-bit BB.

Point is, any combo will work, as a matter of fact before switching to SD card on my laptop I had keep RT's on a 2TB Seagate external USB3 HDD.

Good Luck
Larry

Thanks Larry, this was very informative and helpful.

Deacon,
if you can, avoid spinners
They are outgoing technology (time to go after 60+ years!) unless you need a LOT of space and money is tight.
If you only need 1TB, I would suggest getting a fast SSD. Price difference is not that astronomical.

Misha.

I have an SSD Drive as my C Drive which is where the BB folder lives. RealTracks, RealDrums live on a partition on an HD. I store my song files on a different partition (makes backing up easier I think.)

Seems easy with no issues. Just tell BB where things are and all’s fine.

Tony

Thanks Misha,

While I agree with you in theory, I happen to live in Israel where tech products, as with many other things, there are HUGE (and often seemingly arbitrary) price differentials between various types of products as compared to the US. For example, I can get a 1tb HD here for pretty much the same price as you can get it in the US, but SSDs are crazy overpriced in comparison.

And in case you're asking why I don't purchase it off Newegg, Amazon, Ebay, or etc, the thing is that every once in a while customs will pull some package out and demand an exorbitant fee. While that doesn't happen very often, it happens, and I've never trusted my luck :-(

Two samsung SSD 850 pros, 258 GB (2x Windows 10 boot stuff only) and 1 TB (PRG files and DAW storage stuff). All PG stuff runs from an internal 2TB SATA drive, gets a little crowded now there, have to upgrade is maybe. Or dunk all those old files i never use any more LoL.