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For the best performance on a digital audio workstation (DAW), I had formerly understood that separate drives for the OS, virtual memory (swap) file, and project media files (audio, video, sample content, images, etc.) would offer improved performance over using just one drive, all other things being equal. This also has the benefit of allowing you to reformat and install a new OS without worrying about your project data.
If I were to now build or upgrade a system to use only SSD drives, does this type of separate drives performance optimization still apply? If not or it is negligible, are there any particular scenarios that still benefit, such as video rendering to a separate drive from the source content?
Note that I am not concerned with discussions on backups to HDDs or drive reliability, as my systems are backed up nightly.
UPDATE
I am assuming a decent amount of RAM (16GB: maxed on a Z77 board in this particular case), though I don't believe this means you should actually turn the swap file off.
Good info, thank you. I should've mentioned to assume a decent amount of RAM (16gb, maxed on a Z77 board in this case). – Tim Lehner – 2013-03-08T19:57:11.667
That's an excellent move. With 16GB RAM, that swap file will hardly see any use at all. You tend to get weird application crashes if you disable the swap file entirely (even with 16GB of RAM) as occasionally an app will request a large contiguous region of memory. I don't have direct DAW software experience but I imagine some of them might encounter that issue if the swap file is disabled. I believe you're right to leave it enabled. – John Rose – 2013-03-08T21:11:50.743