I acquired a laptop to do some remote recording (CPU - i7 6500u) with a babyface. I may use this for some editing and mixing as well although that's not the original plan. This one came with a 5400 1TB hard drive. Thinking of removing that slower drive and going to 1 TB SSD and using just one drive for both the audio and OS as one of the options. Another option would be to add a usb3 7200 external for audio. I know the standard is to use 2-drives but my thinking is this laptop won't be used for the whole production - mainly recording raw tracks. Any opinions or guidance from the forum group is appreciated.
 
Thanks,

In all honesty, the 2 drive option stems from a couple simple things. Initially SSDs were tiny, so the option was required. Also, older SSDs didn't take kindly to excessive writes (also a concern with size); for a bigger drive, you are not constantly writing to the same space all of the time.
 
From a practical perspective, 1TB is sufficient for size, so that both of the above concerns are not as applicable as they once were. One thing to consider is that SSDs have higher risk to catastrophically belly-up, so be sure to do a regular backup routine regardless of choice.
 
Even an OS SSD sees the "excessive" writes on certain areas but they still survive, resolve bad blocks, and continue to run. I have a very old 240GB Patriot Wildfire (c. 2011) that had firmware/driver issues that I resolved with fruity workarounds... but I still haven't killed it (yet).

Have lost two SSDs that just died with no warning. I switched on one day and the drive just wasn't there. No recovery possible, game over. I have a very robust backup routine so recovered everything but even with better reliability of SSDs I wouldn't use them without a cloud backup solution like Crashplan and regular remote offline backups as well.

Thank you mettelus and andy. I'm still undetermined which path to take. The 1tb ssd are getting more reasonable in price. I have a 250gb ssd in a drawer from a previous upgrade. I may install that and pick up an external for audio. I've been looking at the lacie 500gb