Don’t be tempted to try to run a DAW system off one of the 128 or even 256 GB SSDs that are often included in budget laptops-a startup drive that size will fill up in no time, and performance and reliability can suffer. However, given that SSDs tend to come in smaller sizes, capacity is a significant consideration. A SSD can provide a noticeably snappier, more responsive overall response and would be a good choice. The OS is constantly accessing this drive in the background, so speed and capacity are especially important. The startup drive-the internal drive that contains the Operating System and applications-is key. Some DAW users employ SSDs for critical use-startup drive and audio drive-and turn to HDDs for backup and general storage. Reasonably-priced HDDs are available with capacities of 4-8 TB and more, while similarly-priced SSDs tend to come in at around 1TB (with larger drives available at considerably higher cost). The only drawback of SSDs is a significantly higher price per GB, but prices are coming down gradually.Īs to disk capacity, the bigger the better. Better still, modern Solid State Drives-SSDs-are RAM-based and offer greater speeds. Traditional mechanical drives-HDDs-should have a speed of 7200 rpm for audio applications. The two considerations for hard disks are size and speed. 16GB is a realistic minimum, with 32GB recommended when possible. There’s an old saying-“you can’t have too much RAM”-and for DAW work it’s definitely true. (Apple’s coming shift-later this year-to their own ARM processors will be a development that will bear watching.) Most computers use Intel CPUs, and again, while the smaller i3 model can handle minimal production needs, an i5 would be the entry level for serious production, with the i7 (or i9) strongly recommended for larger, more demanding sessions. Some CPUs have a feature called hyperthreading, which effectively doubles the number of cores. While the dual-core CPUs often found in budget laptops can certainly manage smaller sessions, for any serious audio/music production-especially if a lot of virtual instruments are used-a quad-core CPU would really be the point of entry, with 6 and 8-core CPUs offering welcome additional juice. Clock speeds have pretty much stabilized at around 3-3.5 GHz, so the most relevant consideration these days is the number of cores. When it comes to CPUs, the clock speed and number of cores are the main specs.