It’s an interesting question.

In my opinion the speed will not matter appreciably. It’s likely that the bottleneck here is the USB channel and a HDD drive might perform almost as well as an SSD for the one-time read. Looking at it on the other end, I believe that writing takes more time than reading, so when copying a large amount of files over USB, the read speed of the source drive is less important. Plus, this is a one-shot operation that you can just let run overnight.

I could be wrong of course. On my computer, copying the entire audiophile RealTracks folder from PG Music’s SSD to my internal M.2 drive took less than fifteen minutes.


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.