Ableton Forum

I purchased an all in one hp pavilion for $100 to upgrade ram and hdd to ssd. It has an intel i5. I will primarily be using it with ableton and occasionally protools with super heavy vst’s like komplete or Superior drummer. After opening the case I discovered it has a M.2nvme drive. I already own a Samsung evo M.2 960 and a Samsung evo 2.5 850. My question is should I put operating system on faster nvme and use sata as designated read/write drive or visa versa?
I will be using additional external ssd for sample libraries.
Trying to get latency as low as possible

Latency is mostly down to the audio interface driver, the interface hardware and the cpu. Another factors is plugins which themselves add latency because of the time needed for them to do their sums.

Latency on Windows PCs can also be affected if deferred procedure calls (dpcs) grab Windows attention for long enough to result in the audio buffer emptying. Whether that happens is mostly down to the hardware and drivers used in that particular PC. If you’re not familiar with it Focusrite have a useful article about it - https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/ ... PC-latency.

Drives have nothing or next to nothing to do with audio latency unless the system is being completely overloaded to the point the drives can’t keep up with the demand for information from them. SATA SSDs are more than capable of coping with most audio tasks. You’d have to be running a lot of channels at high bit and sample rates to max out SSD transfer rates.

As for which drive to use for what, Personally, if I have three drives of adequate capacity to do anything and with varying speeds I’d put the OD/software and swap file on the all-round fastest drive, then sample libraries on a drive with very good random read and seek times and projects on the slowest.