Input on my PC DAW HD configuration

I know there are countless ways to get good results...however, I am building my DAW PC and would appreciate some confirmation that what I have planned for my HD configuration is correct. I plan to do this....

C: (80 GB SSD) Windows 8 OS
D: (256 GB SSD) Sonar X3 Pro, BFD 3, Amplitube 3, VST dll's
E: (500 GB SSD) Audio Content/ Sample Libraries / Loops
F: (1 TB HD) Music Projects / Sessions and Audio Data

I have a 240GB SSD as my O/S drive and 6 TB of magnetic media. The multiple SSD's are overkill in my opinion (I have 67GB free on my SSD and have all programs installed on it). The magnetic media is for project file storage and backups. The only recommendation to magnetic HDD's is get one with a 7200rpm spindle speed minimum.
 
If you want to have both Win7 and Win8 available, you would still only need 2 SSD's for this.
 
Edit: I just searched your motherboard (http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P6T_Deluxe_V2/#specifications ), and it looks like this has SATA II ports on it (3Gb/s)? Is this true? If so, the "speed boost" you get from an SSD will not be as fast as you are expecting. Just a heads up. SATA III (6Gb/s) is the fastest link from an SSD to your motherboard.
 

Make sure the motherboard you are buying supports 6gbps and has more than 2 ports....If you are going SSD to get the speed out of all of them, you should buy the fastest...and put them on the fastest ports.
 
Just a observation.
 
Maximus VI has 10 x sata 6gbps ports.
 
 

mudgel
The standard most commonly seen is:

C: drive OS, programs and plugins, SSD
D: drive, projects SATA 3
E: drive, samples and such SATA 3.

Hi mudgel. I actually saw this configuration quite a bit in researching it online, but I also had read in a few places that it's best to keep the OS installed on its own drive. Is that correct at all?? Also, could you please tell me the sizes of the drives you have listed? Thanks so much for your help.

Mojo3432
 I actually saw this configuration quite a bit in researching it online, but I also had read in a few places that it's best to keep the OS installed on its own drive. Is that correct at all?? Also, could you please tell me the sizes of the drives you have listed? Thanks so much for your help.

No to the OS on "its own drive"... an SSD is like a massive chunk of RAM, and therefore ~300 times faster than a magnetic HDD... it will send data to the CPU as fast as it can handle it, pretty much. Just be sure to research them! You should not defrag them and there are a few other nuances to using them. The cells in them will decay over time, so some features of Windows need to be disabled.
 
For me, I partitioned my E and F... which are physically the same drive, but I have all SONAR data on the F drive only. Spindle speed is important for data rate, as is the SATA III mentioned above.

Hello,
 
I am a low budget (so just 1 SSD)  and I have:
 
Desktop:
C: 160GB standard HDD ->OS and softwares
D: 1TB standard HDD -> Sessions
Z: 128GB SSD -> Sound libraries (I'll make it external)
 
Laptop:
C,D,E: 750GB hybrid HDD with multiple partitions
The Z drive is "substed" form a E: directory
 
I use visualsubst to create virtual drives.
 
The Vst can be on the same drive as OS since they are quite small(few Megabytes) .Most of time, they won't take a long time to load. The only thing which is slow in Vst is the loading of soundbanks.I set a Vst folder on my soundbanks drive only for vsts which load a big soundbank (vstis mostly)
 
Multiple SSDs are interesting since they use different sata ports.
An SSD for sample libraries is very interesting since big soundbanks are read direct from disc.
 
RAID is interesting,yes..A bit bothering to setup.
mirror RAID (RAID1)enable to have an automatic backup.For the sessions that's very good.
slice RAID (RAID0) enable to accelerate access to standard HDD and to use 2 disks as one. When on budget,you can use them to speed up system and sessions and get a bigger disk from 2 smallers. 
There are other RAID settings...
 
Tip:
I always put the sound banks on Z: (change this drive letter to Z) . The reason is simple: Z is mostly never used as drive letters(you'll never get 26 drives in your pc),so on any computer it will be free. That way I can easily use an external HDD to store the soundbanks, set it to Z without changing new pc config, and have my project automatically find the soundbanks when switching pc's. It's also possible to use VisualSubst to create the Z drive from a folder on any other driver.I find it to be very efficient when working both on desktop and laptop: 1 external USB3 SSD with samples,just set it to Z: and boom...you get your soundbanks loaded in you projects, on any computer, without transfering or searching.