Disk Usage and file mngmt

I'm on only my 5th or so major song production since acquiring Sonar Producer and am loving it and learning more each time with a lot more sure to come.
 
Today I did a search in this forum for disk usage, errors and such and found some very informative threads. I have suffered dropouts in the past productions as disk usage hit the redzone so I have been very deliberate in learning about and reducing those problems eg DMA, speed of the hard drive, partitioning for audio, etc 
 
Still I am having a difficulty getting my head around it all.
 
On my current song I have about 50 tracks heading into the final vocals. Of the tracks roughly 20 are dry recordings [as of yet unused inputs] for guitar [loading the wet for now, will tweak at mixing] or midi alternate takes. I had these tracks frozen and hidden. I was running about <5% cpu usage but running >50% disc usage with buffers raised. I would suffer 1 or 2 dropouts a day, perhaps as Norton tried to sqeeze back into life. I felt this is pretty good but way worse with the buffers down to default so that is a main issue.
 
Of interest is I decided to archive all the unused tracks and my disc usage today is way down, between 25 & 50%.
 
So I am now preparing the all important vocal sessions and I am doing a Save As.
 
My question, is there anything about this that will relate to disk errors? If I save my new project to the same folder, will the audio files be duplicated, thus increasing the complexity of the project leading to disc errors, etc.
 
Or is this totally irrelevant?
 
Thanks for the listen and any advice is much appreciated as I attempt to understand this more fully.
 
Robby K

Cj
 
Yup what you say is the case, as I researched this forum today I gleaned a lot and I do need to get a dedicated hard drive, but the current hard drive is 7200 [750 GB, 66% free, pc is for recording only], my buffers are at 512, etc and as I mentioned I'm happy with the disc usage I'm currently at for the complexity of this project [35 running tracks, 9 1/2 minute song].
 
That being said, I am wondering if doing a File/Save As will copy files, increase the size, complexity of the audio folder and thus lead to disk errors.
 
Incidentally, I read many of your posts earlier this morning and learned a lot. Thanks! And you have a wonderful website as well!
 
Robby K

What I do is Create a new folder for each song from the explorer window before I even open sonar.
I then open SOnar and with my template and use "save as " to browse back to that new folder and then I save the song as its name. You need to do this before you record! This will create a audio folder within that folder. 
I can then copy the song folder to a flash drive and move the entire song to another computer.
There is also a "enable song version" toggle ( somewhere) sorry not at DAW right now. Not sure how it saves so never have used it. I believe it creates a new folder for each version but not sure.

Thanks everyone, sounds like I'm in the clear. Good to go.
 
I was mostly concerned with the two checkboxes "Copy all audio with project" (default) vs "Create one file per clip" since there was discussion in the past forums that even freezing a track creates further disc usage since it rendered out a copy.
 
As I mentioned I substantially reduced my disk usage by archiving the unused tracks so I was worried about creeating another 50 by doing the file / save as on this important project. Please note, this wasn't borne out in my past experience as I am usually quite a fanatic about save as with every major step forward, tracking, mixing, mastering with approximately 10 -15 saves per project until completion. All of the resulting audio does reside in the same folder with separate cwp and I usually saw disc usage drop as I simplified each save with rendering audio, etc.
 
Again, much thanks!