This may help. My situation offers a comparison.

I have two PCs for music. They are mostly identical except the production machine has a six-year old i7 and the backup machine has a five-year old i5. I run the audiophile version on both machines (at different times, of course). The operating system is on its own SSD and the BIAB main program runs from a separate SSD, on both machines.

On the production machine, I have an internal 2 TB hard drive for RealTracks and RealDrums only. It’s fast for a hard drive, though, at 10,000 RPM. It’s a Western Digital Caviar. Normal hard drives run slower at 7,200 or 5,400.

My backup machine uses the supplied USB drive for RealTracks and RealDrums.

Surprisingly, the speed of generating a song in BIAB isn’t all that different between the two machines. Sure, things are ‘snappier’ on the production machine but I have no way of knowing what part of that is the CPU and what part is the storage device.

The only way I could speed things up further without a new PC would be an internal 2 TB SSD for RealTracks and RealDrums. I’ve never felt the need to do that.

Bottom line, the USB drive from PG Music runs fine.


BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Roland Integra-7, Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.