Soft synths and hard drives

Hello!

I have two internal hard drives, on the OS-drive I keep my X1 program and on the second I have my recorded audio. Diskspace is not a problem, but for speed, should I have my soft synth librarys (session drummer 3, dimension pro) on the OS-drive or the audio drive? If they should be on the audio drive, how do I get SONAR to recognize them? I am guessing only the library and not the whole VST plugin should be on the audio drive.

Jon

It only matters for soft synths that stream samples... for example, Kontakt (assuming the patch you're playing is large enough for streaming, of course)... Things like DimPro and Session Drummer do not stream from disk, but load the entire sample content into memory... so for those types of sample playback synths it doesn't really matter for realtime performance where you load the samples from. Some other examples of in-memory sample-based softsynths: Addictive Drums, SampleTank, etc. If you're using a streaming softsynth, like Kontakt and the like, then the general recommendation is to dedicate a drive to sample streaming... though I guess if you were hard pressed you could stream from your OS drive so long as you don't have a lot of other activity going on there (like indexing, antivirus, extensive logging, memory swapping, etc.). Make sense?

Somebody at microsoft decided that all of one's "personal content", including application data, should go on the root drive, and specifically in a location specific to that user. Seems like overengineering a simple problem, if you ask me... like, uh, where do you want me to put these files? Oh, you want C:\stuff... sounds good... I was going to say C:\Users\JoeBlow\AppData\Cakewalk\SONAR\AreWeThereYet\NopeMoreFoldersToGo\Folders\Folders\OneMoreFolderForTheHellOfIt\Content... but C:\stuff works too...

The OS drive does not do much when recording audio. 

If it is, find the villain, and change its harness.

Some culprits are auto updaters: quicktime, adobe, java, AV,...  Use msconfig to disable ALL of these programs from starting. And after updating any of them, check with msconfig to once again disable the bastards.

I have the OS drive (C) filled with the DAW software and the VST's. 

I have a second hard drive for storage. This is where I store my audio projects as well as my many and large sample libraries. 

When I load the synth, it is running on the C drive. As I select and load a sample, that is loaded from the storage drive INTO MEMORY.  I have Kontakt and a number of other synths that use very large wave and samples. Some sounds have several hundred files that load just to run one instrument in the synth. ALL of those are placed in memory because they would never run properly in real time if they had to stream off of the hard drive on demand. 

Memory size is much more important then the storage location of the samples.