Ableton Forum

Black Friday deals are all around and I've been shopping, virtually, and luckily not spent anything yet!

I know that most laptops struggle with slower disk spin speeds and I do get the "D" flashing at me sometimes when I'm thrashing Ableton. With the SSD's now increasing in space and reducing in cost, they are becoming more enticing, but...

Has anyone upgraded to an SSD, just for the operating system and crucial applications, and found that accessing samples etc on another normal spinning disk causes it to still be the weakest link?

There are multiple forums that people mention how they no longer have to make a cup of tea while their operating system loads but what of the access from applications to the samples residing on external/internal spinners?

Best practises have always recommended the system drive is to remain separate from data but in this case I'm thinking the upgrade path I ought to be considering is two SSD, one for system/apps, one for Ableton library and samples,
and remaining spinning storage for well, storage where no realtime application access is required.

I'm chomping at the bit to buy one SSD and just see how it goes but that could turn out to be an uneconomical choice if Ableton still has to access those external samples. I have close to 2TB of internal storage and that could turn out to be very costly to replace like for like.

Any input would be a great help.

Best,

Joel

A gigabyte of memory is about an hour of uncompressed 16-bit stereo audio at 44.1 kHz. Your operating system probably uses RAM as a cache for the disk if it does not need it for any other purpose.

It follows that if you can increase your computer's RAM size enough that all the samples you are using at the moment will fit in the system's RAM cache, you don't need a faster disk once those samples have been loaded into RAM once.

Therefore, I would start by adding RAM rather than storing samples on an SSD.

Ark.

Thanks for a clear, precise and very helpful reply.

RAM it is then.

I'm not so sure that RAM is a good idea anymore as Ableton 9.2 & up no longer doesn't seem to utilize memory/disk correctly.

Play a clip through Simpler and Sampler and switch between RAM & disk mode on the Simpler and Sampler and find out why.

Happy New Year all!

No posts on this thread for over 10 years, ….hoping this is a suitable place for my question;

Just bought a (refurbished) Macbook Air M4. Lots of exciting possibilities opening up, after pushing my 2015 Macbook Pro to its limits for the last few years…Anyway, I decided to upgrade to Live 12 Suite at the same time, get as up to date as possible, and I keep getting a pop-up window asking me “ableton would like to access data from other apps”. Anyone able to explain what this means, and advise either way please? Should I allow or not allow?
Thanks!

ampism wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 05, 2026 9:56 am

Happy New Year all!

No posts on this thread for over 10 years, ….hoping this is a suitable place for my question;

Just bought a (refurbished) Macbook Air M4. Lots of exciting possibilities opening up, after pushing my 2015 Macbook Pro to its limits for the last few years…Anyway, I decided to upgrade to Live 12 Suite at the same time, get as up to date as possible, and I keep getting a pop-up window asking me “ableton would like to access data from other apps”. Anyone able to explain what this means, and advise either way please? Should I allow or not allow?
Thanks!

Have a look here, is a MacOS security setting: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/25 ... ortBy=rank

Great, that was easy!
Thanks @cids