X1 startup: fast; X2, X3, Platinum startup: slow

My PC still has Sonar versions back to 8.5 installed on it. In reviewing these versions, I notice that X1 starts up immediately, but later versions take much longer (e.g. 30 seconds to 1 minute ... I haven't timed it precisely). What changed with X2, and is there anything I can do to help this?

I'm a noob, but i turned off the little welcome box with the choices for projects tutorials etc. It now comes right up and I open the "recent" project as it is the last one I was working on. That still takes a while, but I'm thinking of getting an SSD drive for the project folders, etc.Submit Post

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I don't think read performance should be affected but the longevity of the disk can be compromised if you have less than 10 to 15 percent of free space. This is because each sector can only be written to a finite number of times and normally the write algorithm tries to spread writes evenly across the disk (since seek time is non-existent).
 
By the way the earlier Samsung EVO 840 disks had an issue where the read performance would degrade over a couple of months due to an imperfect write procedure. They released a utility to fix it, worth checking out if you have that disk (I do).

Sanderxpander, thanks for the info ... prompted me to look at my Samsung EVO 840 drive again ... and things like turning off Prefetch and Indexing and turning on Write Cache Buffer, and reducing the virtual memory settings seemed like good ideas.   Then of course I ordered another SSD, a Samsung PRO 850 which looks like a better even if more expensive option.    Since CW is busily filling up my 256 GB SSD partition for the system drive ...

COPY the .dlls to the location where most of your VST plugins already reside. The key here is to consolidate and then remove duplicate locations from the list that Platinum scans. For example, I took the .dlls from the Native Instrument plugs and copied them in the folder that contains most of my other VSTs and then removed the Native Instruments folder from the folders/ directories  list that Sonar uses to scan for VSTs. You may not have to do this if you only have one or two sources, but admittedly, I had a lot of directories where VSTs  were residing. (3rd party plugs installing their own directories, Band in a Box directories, Sonar directories, etc) You're not actually moving the plugins, just copying and consolidating them. I would leave the "originals "where they are ,so your other music related programs can find them, just remove them from the list that Sonar looks at on startup. that way it won't be looking at the same VSTs twice.

Platinum probably takes a little longer to start because of the new licensing routine.

I have tried the suggestions here (reduce number of VST folders from 2 to one, pinned Sonar to control bar), and nothing has made a difference. Again, X1 starts up instantly, X2 and newer take a minute. If I understand the comments here, multitouch and VST3 support were added in X2. Maybe this is what is causing the additional startup time.