Question About Installing To Different Drives/Partitions

It's really a matter of personal preference. My single drive laptop is set up with C: for the OS, D: for programs, including Sonar, and E: for Data, including My Documents,Images,etc, Mozilla profiles, Sonar projects, etc.

I like the extra level partitions provide and it makes things easier for maintenance.

C:\(SSD) Drive for OS
D:\Sonar and Progs
E:\Libraries\samples\
F:\Projects
G:\Data Gumpf\documents
H:\Media (music and Videos)

All separate drives

Then I have a NAS box to back up everything.

I only have one internal Hybrid disk.   Then I have 2 USB 3.0 Ports.  Whats the best config for my setup?   Should i partition the internal drive?

markyzno


C:\(SSD) Drive for OS
D:\Sonar and Progs
E:\Libraries\samples\
F:\Projects
G:\Data Gumpf\documents
H:\Media (music and Videos)

All separate drives

Then I have a NAS box to back up everything.

Partitions can be a nightmare if a drive starts to fail.....

I prefer to work with plenty of redundancy and *ALWAYS* backup onto something reliable like a NAS box on a RAID.

@Adam Lewis.

Your best bet might be to find out if you can get another internal hard drive fitted inside your laptop.

That way you can dedicate one to your Operating System,. Programs & Plugins and use the other for Sonar Projects only.

Many people have had great success streaming sample libraries from a fast USB External drive (I have done this myself in the past)

Going with multiple drives is the best way to go...partitions are not usually advised. I'm sure someine here with a more technical base can explain why this is, but I have read on here from Sonar 4 and on that  partitions are a headache...just my 1 red cent...

The issue is head movement, the electromagnets that read and write to the hard drive must move across the spinning platters on a pivot arm to get to the location to read or write. That physical problem is the bottleneck on read/write speed. The advantage of multiple drives is that the heads on each drive can be moving simultaneously which in conjunction with the cache allows much faster access. Putting everything on a single drive means you can only generally be reading at one point at a time, and the heads have to re-position to move to a new segment of data. The distance that the heads have to travel to get to the next sector is a minor but significant factor in keeping the data flowing. If you put data on different partitions, then in the event that sequential reads are on different partitions, you will probably make it necessary for the heads to move further (across a physical partition boundary) to get data on a different partition. A single partition might (but will not necessarily) involve shorter distance of travel. Partitions may (but will not necessarily) slow access, but separate physical drives will almost certainly speed up access. It is possible to set up partitions that improve access by putting the critical frequently used data on the fastest part of the drive. 


Partitions are not a pain in the ass, or particularly problematic if you use them properly. I always partition my system drive since large drives have a huge excess of capacity over what is needed for most OS and program storage. I create a small tight system partition that is easily backed up with an imaging program, and use the excess space, on a second partition, for backups etc. I am not aware that a partitioned drive is more prone to failure or more difficult to recover data from after a crash. In some cases they may be less so. The hidden recovery partition under Windows is a testament to the utility of protecting data by partitioning.

It's the size of the partitions that is essential. If you make them wrong you end up with one partition getting full and the other one having space you can't use sensibly.