Installing Programs to a Different Hard drive?

My windows 10 ssd is pretty small so I had the idea to install programs on a 2nd drive. What's the best way to do this? Simply pointing the installer to another drive doesn't put everything there (Sonar puts Dimension & other content on C:\ with no option).
 
Can the C:\Program Files folder be redirected to another drive letter?
 
Can the C:\ drive be extended to another drive? (tried this in disk management but not possible)
 
Options?

soens
 
Can the C:\Program Files folder be redirected to another drive letter?

It can be done, but I wouldn't recommend it.
 
This ought to help...
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Moving-audio-libraries-for-Soft-Synths-to-different-hard-drive-m3360245.aspx

Generally even a 128 GB SSD will be enough storage to hold all your apps and it is defiantly recommended all software be kept on C drive.
Then the content and samples are put elsewhere.
I have a lot of software installed to my C drive and it's sitting at about 62 GB.
But I do housekeeping especially after running CCC.
I back up the Sonar downloads folder to my H drive and delete everything. That folder can get real big.  I've yet to have to roll back so cannot comment on how easy this would be.

For programs other than SONAR?  I have many that are stored on other drives.  I have Program Files and Program Files(x86) directories on 3 drives other than C
 
For me, which drive to install on comes down to two factors; will they operate correctly on another drive, and how quickly do I want the program back if I need to restore.  These are secondary to me wanting the smallest possible C image that contains the programs that would take the most effort to reinstall and get tweaked back to the way they were.  That makes SONAR and VSTs no-brainers for C.  Everything else can be scattered hither-dither AFAIC
 
For installation on other drives, I just change the drive letter in the path presented for install.  I have had zero problems with anything I've installed on different drives.
 
Note that I have a nightly backup job that runs on all drives.
 
I have projects on a separate drive and content on yest another drive along with sample libs.

Aside from relatively quick loading of Windows and applications, the performance gains of an SSD to store those programs is exaggerated. Most applications load from the drive (slow) but run primarily from RAM (fast). If you have enough ram to avoid constantly writing to virtual memory, an SSD is not a big deal. You can find a 1TB hard drive  for under $50.00, about a sixth of the price for an SSD that size, and the time you save by fast booting from an SSD may well be negligible compared to trying to shoehorn your applications into a small SSD boot drive. 
 
If your C: drive is limited in size, then rather than "extend" drive to a larger platter drive, you can use symbolic links to fool your system into thinking things that are stored elsewhere are actually located on your C: drive. Of course doing so will negate the illusory performance advantage you imagine you have achieved by using an SSD for C:. 
 
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/
 

What a mess Windows installation has become. I miss the notion of installing something by way of a folder copy ... to wherever you want.

My guess is that most people use a system (laptop, desktop, etc) where they are the sole user's of that system. But the whole installation process is predicated around multiple users in multiple roles.

All those roaming folders and local folders and bewildering registry items. I'm a software engineer of 30 years and I can't believe it's come to this.

Hey, soens. Do you use Sonar and those other programs regularly in the same "session" (as in between boot up and shut down)?
 
Because if you have programs you don't ever anticipate needing while making music might I suggest you set up a "dual boot" scheme where Sonar and everything you need for music is on one drive and everything else is on another. So when you want to make music you boot to the Sonar drive (and you probably want to use your SSD for music because it's likely to benefit from the extra speed far more than other programs except video editing stuff or modern video games).
 
Bit of a pain having to change your boot order all the time to get at one installation or the other but that depends on how you use the system. Might be tolerable and really isn't a huge deal.
 
Now this is based on my laymen's concept of how that would work... which in my mind BOTH drives would be seen as the C drive depending on which drive you boot to. I could be wrong on that.
 
Also scook has posted LOTS of info about using "MKLINK" to trick Windows/systems into thinking certain files and entries are on one drive when they are actually on another. I am not sure if that would help entirely (or at all) in this situation but at the very least might help you move a whole bunch of stuff to other drives that don't need to physically be on the C drive to work BUT still be accessible on the C drive (just via an MKLINK which then retreives whatever it is from the linked drive).
 
Just some ramblings.
 
/not a tech
 

I don't think I want to go back from using SSD drives for my C drive. I still have one W7 computer with a 1 TB 7200 drive and it just seems to take way too long to boot compared to my others with SSD. And it's been optimized for a DAW so not much else running in it. It's my old DAW but from time to time I'll run it and mess about with experimental stuff before I use it on my main machine. I'm trying the demo for Cubase 8.5 right now. But boy, it's noticeably slower than any of my other machines.
 
I even have an SSD in my little Asus Netbook which is a pathetic 1.8 Atom processor, 2 GB ram, XP 32 bit. It is super snappy to work with.  It can only have one drive so I used a 240 GB and it's only at 35% right now. It's my playback laptop for gigs so loaded with a lot of Wave files, But I also use it for traveling and it has Sonar 8.5 on board.
 
I have mostly 240 GB SSD for C drives now but my office desktop only has a 120 GB and it seems fine. It also has 4 TB of other storage with 3 other regular 7200 drives.  It has Sonar X1 LE which I never use. I did a bare bones install sans content and demos.