I honestly don't have the energy to read the whole thread here, so apologies if I'm repeating stuff, but just wanted to add a couple things:

First, yes it's possible to add a PCIe card to mount some NVMe SSD's to a machine that doesn't have any M.2 slots. However, if the CPU/BIOS/etc of that computer is too old it will not be able to boot from that SSD, but Windows should be able to access it after bootup. There may be workarounds depending on your machine (aftermarket BIOS, bootloaders, etc), but I haven't personally tried any of them.

Second, yes PCIe SSD's are faster than Sata SSD's, but in most cases it's unnecessary to upgrade if you already have some sort of SSD. Access time is more important than throughput, and for audio-related tasks most people won't notice the upgrade. Of course, other non-audio tasks could see a speed improvement, so by all means go for it if you want to.


Originally Posted By: Mike Halloran
Fortunately, if doing audio, you don’t need a very fast computer.

Indeed. I regularly use a 10-year old laptop that has a 2nd gen i5, 16gb of ram, and a 500gb Sata SSD. No problems whatsoever.

A friend of mine uses a 13-year-old iMac with a Core2Duo and 6gb of ram (not 16, 6!), also with a Sata SSD. We collaborate on tunes a fair amount. He doesn't run into any performance issues.

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