5400 RPM Enough Juice To Run Sonar 5?

Download the demo, start using it, and see what happens.

Slower hard disks will have a harder time keeping up if you are playing back or recording lots of tracks, especially at higher sample rates/bit depths, or if you are using demanding (big) sample-based plugin instruments. Hard disk speed doesn't pose much of a hinderance to your ability to run effects and synthesizers-- that has more to do with CPU, RAM, and bus speed.

Working at higher latencies will take a lot of the strain off the hard disk, but will comprimise your ability to hear what you're doing in real time (i.e. there will be a delay between when you press a key on the keyboard and when you hear the note from the plugin instrument)-- this can be a problem if you plan to use a lot of software synthesizers and samplers, but maybe less of an issue when recording "real" instruments.

Sonar comes with a couple of handy little meters in the lower right corner-- one indicates CPU usage, the other indicates disk usage. They run from green to yellow to red, then Sonar crashes-- gives you a very good idea of how much is too much and where your weakness is.

To run a full-blown, full-featured "studio in a box" that is reliable enough to be called professional, you almost certainly need two fast hard drives, a fast system bus, lots of RAM, and a heavy-duty CPU. On the other hand, Sonar will absolutely boot up and run on much creakier machines and there are plenty of people making great home recordings today who would love to have your system, so you might be fine.

Perhaps more to the point, fast hard drives are not a requirement of Sonar so much as they are a requirement of modern computer recording in general-- Logic, ProTools, Nuendo, N-Tracks, Samplitude, whatever-- it's not some Sonar-specific requirement, it's the physical demands of moving large amounts of digital audio data in real-time. So when you say you "don't want to buy the SW if the goose won't fly," you should rephrase that and say, "I don't want to do computer recording if my hard drive is too slow," and see if it's still something you agree with.

cheers.

I'm running Sonar 5PE on my 2Ghz PentiumM with the internal 100Gb 5400RPM HD without breaking a sweat

Compaq V2000, Turion Ml37, 1g ram, Firebox. I forgot to switch the project from the 5400 drive to the external 7200 drive and after recording 28 24/44 tracks at 3 ms latency(double-mic acoustic guitars), two at a time with input monitoring on, a perfect space on a bus and Sonitus comp on the master, I then upped the latency to 6 ms. and added 4 vocal, 3 bass and 2 electric guitars as well as a Sonitus reverb and 3 Sonitus track compressors. Obviously recording 8 tracks at once may not be so easy but there you are ...

Best,