Ableton Forum

I picked up a pretty good deal on a laptop upgrade for myself which is an Acer Nitro AN515-57. The processor is an 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-11400H @ 2.70GHz and I upgraded it to 32.0 GB of ram. The primary C drive is a LITEONIT L8T-256L9G-11 M.2 256Gb drive and there's a second 2.5" drive installed which is a WDC WD10SPZX-08Z10 5400 rpm data drive. For Audio I'm using a Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 connected via USB. The new laptop has Thunderbolt, but from what I understand the Scarlett cannot leverage Thunderbolt.

I need some guidance on what to install where. Ableton should probably be installed on the SSD C: drive, but what about VST's and sound files? Should they also be on the SSD C:? And should I upgrade the D: drive to an SSD? I could "steal" a 2 GB SSD from my old laptop which is a Crucial CT2000MX500SSD1 drive, but I'd need to do some moving around of data to clear space. I'm also considering just buying a SSD for the new laptop's D Drive and leaving the old laptop intact for "Non Music" purposes.

Thanks all for your guidance as I begin to learn all about Ableton!!

Hey mate!

Congrats on the new computer! 256gb certainly doesn't go too far when you have a ton of audio/VSTs so I think adding additional SSDs is going to help. It's really useful if you have Kontakt/sample-based VSTs - the samples load or "stream" (poor choice of words, I know) much faster with far less dropouts than a traditional HD.