Max and External SSD Drive

António Florença's icon

Hi,

I have recently acquired a brand new OWC external SSD drive, and I'm trying to figure out what apps I should put on it or not. So, here's the question:

Are there any significant gains in migrating my copy of Max 8 from my native HD to the external SSD drive? Or would just storing my Max/MSP projects on the external SSD drive be better? I'm on a 64GB RAM, late 2015 iMac, running macOS 10.14.5 (I might upgrade to 10.14.6, but not Catalina though.)

Any hints or insights on this issue would be much appreciated.

All the best,
António

Source Audio's icon

just putting apps on SSD does not speed anything up.
Where apps execute stuff, read/write files, cache etc
is what counts.

11OLSEN's icon

starting and running your os from ssd is what really saves you lifetime. but with an external drive i don't know. maybe resources like audio files, vst data,...

António Florença's icon

Hi Source Audio, 11Olsen,

Thanks for the input. I'll migrate my Max/MSP workspace incrementally, as I feel the need for it. My system already runs Max smoothly, so I'll start just by migrating packages and externals as well as the most processing-intensive patches, and see how it goes...

All the best,
António

11OLSEN's icon

Just wanna add that you can make hardlinks (on windows it's mklink.exe, on Mac don't know) to simply move and refer complete folders to/from external drive. Things like your VST folder for example, where you can't simply reinstall everything to a new location.
O.