Drive Speeds & Mac File Management

[Deland01]

Guys, I'm swapping my DAW from Windows to a new Mac mini M4 pro and need some advice on drive types, speeds & field management.

My Windows machine has several SSDs & 2 NVMe drives all internal. The 2 NVM2 drives contain:

Drive 1 (1TB) : System Drive, Apps, VST3,
Drive 2 (1TB): Audio Drive, Samples, VST library Content, VST2, VST x32 (old bridged Vst's), Ableton project files.

Note: I used to run all VSTs from drive 2 but I found VST3 prefer to run better from the default place on the system drive.

I've upgraded the Mac mini spec so the system drive is 1TB but from what I've seen so far people are saying to run a separate drives similar to how I have my Windows machine running.

Can anyone offer any advice on how many external drives to have & what makes /models you have?

My NVMe drive hit read/write speeds of 5000Mb/s so my concern is running external drives I won't see anywhere near this. The Mac has Thunderbolt 5 but the cost for this are very high & do I even need this?

I mainly produce Ableton projects with upto 100 tracks & use synths & midi the most. I'll freeze & bounce to audio when possible.

What setups do you guys use & how fast are your drives

[[jur]]

Keep AUs, VSTs on the system drive.
Put your samples and maybe things like Kontakt instruments on your 2nd drive. You could also put and run Projects from this one.
Don't worry about the speed, audio streams are actually light, a usb-c SSD will perfectly do it.
If everything can sit on your system drive only, then go with it, separating things isn't required (it used to help a lot in the past with optical drives, but these days are over).

[Deland01]

Thanks for the advice, I've seen some YouTube vids saying they have x4 different drives which seams a bit overkill for me and will work out to be very expensive if I went with NVMe drives or thunderbolt 4.

I've got some spare decent SATA SSDs so might just buy some USB3 enclosures which will save some money.

[[jur]]

I've seen some YouTube vids saying they have x4 different drives

It's about what YOU need
Putting your spare SSD into a USB enclosure is a no-brainer. I'm using one dedicated to Live-related content on a M1 machine, it works flawlessly.