The Efficient DAW

dav | 2021-04-10 07:26:57.276280+00:00

Ever find when you're recording or mixing that once you start using too many tracks or plug ins you start to get system issues and error messages? I've had this happen to me many times! You're just about to record the take of your life when the music stops and a message box appears telling you your computer has run out of processing power. It's extremely frustrating.  

The lap top I use for recording is older and only has a Hard Disk Drive (HDD). HDD's are a lot slower than the newer Solid State Drives (SSD) and have a mechanical arm that jumps around writing information to disk, they are also quite fragile meaning they can be quite easy to damage. SSD's have no moving parts and information is stored on integrated circuits. There can be issues with SSD's failing however after excessive writes to the storage circuits. Have a read of this article to learn more about the drives and the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Why the discussion on drives? Well it turns out you can make your DAW work far more efficiently by using a separate external drive alongside your internal drive. Using only my internal HDD to run my DAW and all other aspects of a session puts a lot of pressure on the drive to process the large amount of information I'm asking it to. Making use of a separate external drive means work can be shared between the drives leading to efficiencies and less system issues. The way I work it is that I have my DAW software running off the internal HDD but save my sessions to an external SSD. This frees up the internal HDD to run the DAW software while audio recording is written to the external SSD. 

I've found this set up has worked well for me, I still get error messages sometimes but it's far less frequent. By the way, I could have used another HDD as my external drive if I wanted to, the idea is to 'share the load' between drives. If you experience this issue, give this idea a try - I don't think you'll be disappointed.