If you cant get it, then I fear you do not have the capacity to understand. All you are doing is again, restating false information. Your stated qualifications don’t seem to match to your actual understanding of audio recording and you don’t seem to understand what it is I am saying, your replies don’t match my points. There is no point in me continuing a conversation with you and nobody else in this thread is interested in our spat. So I am happy to leave it there with you.
My point is, to the average user, distributing the data load is more important than running a single hard drive and obsessing about the CPU. A single SSD over a HDD may make that easier, I don’t know. I would like to know how well a mac with a single SSD would handle a typical session, perhaps it is possible.
Typically, when anyone is using a laptop with a single hard drive, all may go smoothly but as they increase their track and plugin count and up VST usage and samples used they face bottlenecks and get juddery performance, poor latency etc. The way to deal with this is not to increase the CPU size but to spread the data load in different ways. Those who use large sample libraries and high track counts/plugins already know this, which is why they tend to switch to a desktop situation over a laptop. Yes you can attach external drives to a laptop and that may be a solution but laptops then have other problems with heat etc.
My typical session might be 15-20 VST instruments, some Kontakt and other libraries, 30 or so tracks and maybe up to 40 plugins or so and then of course I also want to record and playback smoothly with ZERO latency. So this is what I do with a puny 4th generation i5 and 8 gigs of ram. I tried it on a single 7200rpm HDD absolutely not possible, juddery playback, freezing, crashes, unreliable recording and poor latency. Didn’t like it at all (I would like to know if this is possible using a single SSD).
Once I had the sample libraries on one HDD (just upgraded to SSD), the recording/projects on another 7200 HDD and the OS and programs on another SSD then everything went smoothly, using the same CPU and ram. I further achieved zero latency recording by getting the UR44 and using the onboard DSP direct monitoring chip to do that.
I don’t think my system is anything out of the ordinary, it’s the same setup many others use in all different DAW forums. It’s just a typical 3 drive setup used by most people who are using big sample libraries and higher track counts.
My point is, for me with this system, the CPU is not that important. I think if you are going to test how different DAW’s perform against each other, then you would want to eliminate the other bottlenecks that arise in music production related to data load. It’s not just about CPU performance.
I could see though, that if you are more into a lot of synth style electronic music and not using large sample libraries or doing lots of audio tracks then 1 hard drive might be fine and then the CPU performance might be more important so I guess it depends on what you do.