Computer & HDD for Home Recording

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Phrankenstrat

New member
Very new here. And new to the idea of cutting my own guitar parts at home. I purchased a decent AIO computer a bit ago. Windows 11,Intel i7 processor, 32GB of RAM, 4GB graphics card but only one internal 1TB SSD HDD. If I could go back and change anything, I would have gotten on with two HDD's. My question is if I partition the current drive to have the OS run on one partition, will it improve performance? The computer does not have a Thunderbolt connection. I'm assuming an external drive would not have the speed needed to track smoothly to it but as I said, I'm very new to this. I record in several studios and they keep telling me I can do my tracks at home and just send those to them. That's my goal here. I will be using a Kemper direct to my interface. Will I be ok tracking with the single drive? Do I need to partition it? I probably will anyway. I will still use an external drive for storage of course and back up to the cloud. Any insights would be great at this point. Old musicians trying to keep up with the younger crowd.
 
Your drive should be plenty fast enough without any special partitioning. Audio recording takes very little in the way of computing power so any computer made in the last 15 years will be able to do multitrack recording. The people that need computing power are those using large sample libraries or those doing video and 3D.
 
I don't think partitioning an SSD will speed up anything. Everything is in RAM chips, and there are no delays like you have in a traditional drive where the head has to physically move back and forth. Partitioning a drive resulted in physically using more limited area, which means the seek times could be reduced. It also would usually reduce the TOC, so there was less information that needed to be parsed to find a file.

An external drive would be suitable for holding project files. USB3 is pretty fast. If you use virtual instruments, you probably want to keep those on the SSD. Otherwise, with 32GB, most things will be loaded into memory and not employing the swap files as was common in the past when you had more limited memory and slower hard drives.

I load projects from an external USB3 drive all the time, and it takes maybe 2 or 3 seconds longer to load the whole thing. My normal data drive is a standard 7200rpm Barracuda drive.
 
So it sounds like I should be more than fine. Yes, I would use the external drive for storage. Thank you both for the quick answer. Now to decide on some decent budget monitors. I had no idea there were so many out there.
 
FYI, the same logic applies to defragmenting SSDs. Drive makers actually recommend against it, since it doesn't improve access time and actually uses up write cycles on the memory chips, which do have a lifespan (although a big one).
 
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