Dude! I had a faulty WD – Black a few years ago. I replaced that with a Seagate 4TB – and didn’t have an issue with it.

That being said – I’ve since migrated the Seagate as a dedicated swap drive – and now Ableton sits on a SSD – and the samples / projects all sit on a separate SSD. This is pretty common in audio set-ups because the idea is that the program reads temp files and data from one drive and runs off of a separate drive. It’s even more ideal when rendering to have Ableton pull data from one drive and render to another – so the processor isn’t having to split Read-Write commands on the same thread.

My setup is like this:

C:\ Samsung 500GB SSD – Ableton is installed here
D:\ Mushkin 1TB SSD – All of Ableton’s libraries, temp folders, etc are here
F:\ Seagate 4TB SSD – All cold-storage is here. This drive isn’t accessed very often.

Also – MAKE A BACKUP!

Also – RAID IS NOT A BACKUP!

I have a data-server that I store stuff on; and regularly backup my projects – at least once a month.

(not sure why the site is displaying this post first – because I wrote out the longer one first)

Here’s the way I handle storage. I use HDD’s when I need to store a large amount of data. My gigantic sample library that is hundreds of gig’s is here. I also store my video archives here. But I have an SSD for my OS, a Separate SSD for only Ableton Projects, and a separate SSD specifically for my current video projects.

Solid states have definitely come down in price a lot in the last few years.

You can get an internal samsung 1TB SSD on amazon for like $168. https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Inch-Internal-MZ-76E1T0B-AM/dp/B078DPCY3T/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1538961398&sr=8-2&keywords=samsung+1tb+ssd

Or an external USB 3.0 1TB samsung SSD on amazon for like $228 https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-T5-Portable-SSD-MU-PA1T0B/dp/B073H552FJ/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1538961517&sr=8-3&keywords=samsung+1tb+ssd+external

Solid states are much more reliable. However I did have a solid state drive die on me once. It was my audio drive where I kept all my ableton projects. Thankfully I backed everything up 2 weeks before that so I only lost a few projects. But I still lost stuff. Had I not backed up then, the time I backed up before that was 8 months before that. I would’ve lost A TON. So I realized I needed to make some changes.

Now I use splice. Every time I hit save in Ableton, splice will automatically start uploading projects like a free cloud backup. But splice doesn’t always upload everything, and even then it still only uploads ableton projects. What if you didn’t collect all and save? And what about all your other files.

For that reason, I have a WD mycloud drive (it’s basically an external drive with an ethernet jack on it) that is where my backups are stored. You can manually copy and paste files, but I wanted something automatic. I got really shwifty with it and wrote a batch script to create a robocopy mirror of my audio drive and my active video projects on to the mycloud. Now this is a mirror so it replaces the files that are already on the mycloud with the latest version. Originally I had a scheduled backup to automatically copy every night. The problem was I was afraid if somehow I broke a project file on my computer, I wanted to have a backup to go back to. If this was copying daily, I didn’t have anything to revert back to. So now my robocopy script runs every 48 hours. I know that this whole thing is probably beyond what most people would do, but I wanted to have a backup solution that I knew I could count on, was automatic, and not have to worry about paying for monthly cloud storage and on and on.

Anyways, hope this helps. I do IT as my day job. If you need more help, let’s do a private session sometime?

-Ben