Partition or external drive?

[il picaro]

Hi Guys,

Hope this finds all of you well.
I have a question which periodically keeps recurring among musicians' circles:

Is it better to store sample libraries in a dedicated partition on the main hard drive, or is it better to store them in an external portable drive?

I've heard stories that if the external drives are not SSD (which is my case) then it's not worth it, and other versions say to bypass completely the external drives and just do a partition on the PC and that's it.

What is your experience?

Thank you as always,
Enrico

[mikehalloran]

You’re reading old news parroted by armchair experts not hindered by actual knowledge of how things work. They like to insist and use such words as must and only… Ignore them.

In the bad old days, you could partition IDE/ATA drives to increase streaming efficiency with multi threading. SATA busses increased the bus speed 15x, then 30x, now 45x (SATA III) and eliminated any advantage to partitioning in the process. NVMe over PCIe is multiple times faster.

SSDs do not work like mechanical hard drives. The only reason to partition an SSD is to run a separate OS. To partition for any other reason is to reduce available drive space without benefit. If storing VIs on your system drive, do it in a folder.

The same applies to HDDs also.

Some repair/recovery utilities create their own small boot partition. The MacOS does this by default when properly installed for example. These contain a minimal OS and take up a tiny bit of space.

The MacOS now formats SSDs to APFS. This allows additional boot volumes without reducing available drive space. Windows does not have the equivalent (yet?).

[bayswater]

SSDs do not work like mechanical hard drives. The only reason to partition an SSD is to run a separate OS. To partition for any other reason is to reduce available drive space without benefit. If storing VIs on your system drive, do it in a folder.

If you're running a separate OS, you can do that (on a reasonably up to date Mac and OS version) with volumes, rather than partitions, and this way you don't reduce available space, other than the space taken up by the separate OS. So even a separate OS doesn't justify a partition on an SSD.

[mikehalloran]

SSDs do not work like mechanical hard drives. The only reason to partition an SSD is to run a separate OS. To partition for any other reason is to reduce available drive space without benefit. If storing VIs on your system drive, do it in a folder.

If you're running a separate OS, you can do that (on a reasonably up to date Mac and OS version) with volumes, rather than partitions, and this way you don't reduce available space, other than the space taken up by the separate OS. So even a separate OS doesn't justify a partition on an SSD.

The OP lists Windows.

[bayswater]

The OP lists Windows.

oops

[il picaro]

Thanx for the info, as usual.
Enrico