The only ordeal with re installing win 10 is re installing all the apps. I imagine thats what most folks worry about.
Many apps that can migrate an OS complete to a another drive. Probably you would still have to re authorize vsts and apps. Some are free, most all ae dirt cheap.
 
I asked Izotope (I have many of their plugins) if just cloning to a new HD would trigger authorization and they said definitely.
Kind of a bummer really.
 
I remember back when you had to change "X amount" of things to trigger a different machine code. Now it's aplmost anything.
That stinks imho.

Steev
I had recently cloned my aging boot/system magnetic hard drive a Western Digital VelociRaptor 10K rpm 500 gig  to a Western Digital SSD 500 gig with Windows 10 using the Acronis software that shipped with the SSD to clone it, and it was shockingly FAST and simple cloning and transferring about 240 gigs of data took about 20 minutes to complete.
  I set Acronis up started it and by the time I had a cup of coffee and eat an egg sandwich, it was DONE!
 
 I was very suspicious, I was preparing myself for the worst possible scenario thinking "Oh what kind of new Hell has this free Acronis software unleashed upon me?", because cloning has at times been a bit NERVE WRACKING! It usually took me hours in the past, and sometimes had to be repeated when failed the first time around, very annoying and time-consuming to say the least.
But when I disconnected the VelociRaptor and set the SSD up as Boot Drive in BIOS I was amazed when my computer booted right the way I left it... Just a bit faster. I didn't even have to reregister any plugins with iLOK , Sony, or XLN Audio and was a pleasant surprise and first for me.

Well, I think I'll do as you suggest, just with another cloning software, but I get your idea.
 

Steev
WD Raptors spin at 10,000 rpm, and are very fast, to begin with, quiet as a church mouse, but mine was over 7 years old and I being I had a couple of failed boot ups in the past month or so, and I think I might have heard some strange rattling noise(?) so I figured it might be getting old, tired, and weary, so it's always better to stay on the save side and replace it with a new one, but...….. WD stopped manufacturing VelociRaptors, but, after buying out SanDisk, replaced the VelociRaptor line with the SSD line soo...……..
That just made it a tad bit more scary having read some horror stories about SSDs in the past, just failing without the slightest signs of warning (like strange rattling noise from mechanical failure, but most of these stories were over a couple of years old now, soooo...…..
 
Also knowing that I can always plug my old cloned drive back in and start right back up where I left off, I went in to Newegg and bought me the WD SSD, and got Shell Shocked at how much the price went down and warranty went up!
$74 (us) for a 500GB WD SSD with a 5-year warranty! Pretty much the same as the WD VelociRaptors, except they cost $350 7 years ago, which was pricey, yes, but they were the world's fastest most reliable champions.
 VelociRaptors are so fast I didn't see much of a performance boost, bench test results of 6%, but that's still noticeable. :o)
 
 And so after a few months now, I've grown from fearing SSDs to really, really liking them
 Same as I have Win 10, which after years now, has proven to be sooo freaking better and makes my life sooo much easier and hassle-free than ANY other OS has ever done in the past.
 Especially during upgrading which it does all by itself, if it fails it just rolls itself back and you're right back where you left off.
If for some reason you don't like the upgrade, you have 30 days to decide roll it back.
 
As long as you have hardware and software that ISN'T over 6 or 7 years old, you should have zero problems with Win 10.
 
But if you do love the vintage stuff, stay with your vintage computer and vintage OS and be happy until it dies.
But the longer you wait, the stranger you will feel in the strange land of ever-evolving technology.
And you will most likely feel ridiculous when you realize how much better and easier it gets, and also realize it better to keep learning in small in small increments than having to start all over in BIG CHUNKS.
 
There's REALLY NOTHING TO FEAR BUT FEAR ITSELF!

Well, I am using Win 10 home 64 bit, no vintage anymore. :-) Actually, you just confirm what I am up to, thankx for that.

Johnbee58
I still have ALL of my project folders on my HDD but I'm probably going to have to remove them soon as I'm running low on space on my onboard 1TB drive on my music dedicated PC.  But you need to understand that I keep everything.  Every vocal take, etc and I could probably get rid of most of it and still maintain enough data for remixes or whatever down the road but it's an obsession with me.  I hate to throw things away, even digital stuff.  I have all my projects backed up on a newly acquired TB Passport USB drive.  Deleting those project files from the HDD would give me back about 2/3 of my so far used space.

I have grown to the idea if it's possible to have a 3rd onboard HD: I am about ( after all the answers I found here) to clone my 500 GB system SSD to a 1 TB SSD (reasonable prices these days), and use the 500 GB SSD for the current project outputs before they are accomplished. Maybe my PC architecture allows this. Otherwise, I can save finished projects on an external HD which I also keep here.

Johnbee58
Regarding cloning-I didn't know it was so easy.  I put a thread up on this forum several weeks ago regarding backing up the whole HDD in case of total data loss or corruption. I think what I was really looking for was cloning, but I didn't use that term at the time.  I used the term "backup" so everybody just went along and gave me answers about backups.   Cloning was what I had in mind like explained here.  I want to move all my system files, including data, configurations, and setups just as they are to a new drive so if I have to replace say a motherboard or something hardware, I can do that without starting over again after the fix.  I'm also looking at the possibility of a solid state drive.  Aren't those still kind of expensive though?

I have a limited offer for a 1 TB SSD by Seagate at EUR 138.00, VAT included. I think that's a thing to snap at.

Mad_Musicologist
I have grown to the idea if it's possible to have a 3rd onboard HD

My guess is this is real source of the issue - too much non-system related data on the system drive. 500GB is a big system drive. Expanding the size of the system drive instead of adding to non-system drive space for non-system data is poor disk management. Consider adding additional non-system space, if necessary and cleaning up the existing system drive.
 
The sample-based synths bundled with SONAR load relatively small sample sets per program and do not stream samples. The only advantage to having their samples on an SSD is faster program/project loading. Synths that stream samples or load big sample sets are a different matter.

Here is a wonderful free utility that will show you what is filling up your folders on Windows.  I use it to wrangle my disk utilization all the time. 
 
Windows explorer doesn't really show the relative folder sizes in use, but this does it very well!!!
 
https://windirstat.net/

The "Cakewalk Content" and "Cakewalk Projects" folders are assigned in SONAR/CbB, so you can simply move them to a new drive and map them inside SONAR/CbB via Preferences->File->Folder locations.
 
Regarding disk management otherwise (using directory junctions), please see this post regarding finding the massive directories on your C drive (to me, "massive" is anything over 5GB, since I keep my OS drive around 125GB or lower just for imaging reasons) and creating directory junctions to them. I just bought a Samsung 970 EVO NVMe m.2, so remapped things by simply breaking the C junction and assigning it to the new F drive (after copying the D drive to F from the post referenced above). A little more detail to the post above, pretty much all of the "massives" are in the following directories (I do not junction system directories, since they are what you want in a disk image for restoring):
 
C:\Program Files
C:\Program Files (x86)
C:\Users\[your user name]\Documents
C:\ProgramData
 
As many libraries are now defaulted to "User/documents" (I always use defaults except for VST Plugins anymore, then junction them), here is an example from that post on how to junction:
 
mklink /j "C:\Users\[your user name]\Documents\Celemony" "D:\Celemony"
 
the format is mklink /j [source] [target] and the source directory must not exist (i.e., be moved) to create it.
 
Celemony's Separations are stored here, and only purge when they breach 10GB by default IIRC. To make the junction, first copy the Celemony directory (from C:\Users\[your user name]\Documents\) to your target location, and add both directories to a text file (via NotePad is easiest). You can also get the path accurately without typing by clicking on the address bar in Windows Explorer and copying the text path that gets highlighted.
 
In the text file, I save this content:
 
mklink /j "C:\Users\[your user name]\Documents\Celemony" "D:\Celemony"
/pause
 
the /pause keeps the window from auto-closing so that you know it works. Save that file (I believe NotePad forces it to be .txt), then rename it to .bat. Right clicking the .bat, you can run as Administrator, and the popup window will tell you success before you manually close it.
 
I found it easier after making the first to right click that .bat file, editing it for a new junction, then saving with a new name (this will keep the .bat extension, and give you one file for each junction made).
 
Bottom line, you can easily recover 75% of a 500 GB OS drive doing the above... for your purposes, keeping it "within reason" is all that you need to do. Let TreeSize Free be your guide and start with the biggest directories first. Paths with audio (including samples) and video in them alone will probably do it, and as mentioned before, the ones found in SONAR/CbB via Preferences->File->Folder locations can just be moved and remapped there (SONAR/CbB preferences *are* the "junctions" in that case... no bat files necessary).
 
[Quick edit] The downloads folder and Temp directories can also fill quickly and get out of hand if not specifically checked. I move downloads to an external spinner, and purge Temp folders ever week or so. These would also be found with an app that can list directories by size (I use TreeSize Free, but there are others as mentioned elsewhere).

What plugins would you lose? I don't think you would lose any of them.  I've always put my content on a separate drive.  The Cakewalk exe. files are small.
 Bandlab is pretty much a lateral move.
 
 Take inventory of what's sing up drive space.  If you installed Platinum "everything" it would take up 19gb.  Rapture and Dimension sounds can be put on another drive.
 
 If we are talking about a laptop then it's a different scenario.

Good thing to do if you're considering this is to check and see how much space SPlat is actually using. CbB doesn't take up all that much room on my C: drive.
 
SPlat was a suite, and there was a lot of valuable software that came with it that doesn't come with CbB. If you uninstall it, the other software might uninstall along with it.
 
As others have already said, chances are you can free up a TON of space by just getting rid of or moving stuff that doesn't need to be on your C: drive anyway.

kitekrazy1
 If you installed Platinum "everything" it would take up 19gb.

This is true but most of it may be used in CbB. This is why I reported the size of the parts of Platinum in program files, programData, Cakewalk content and user directories that are Platinum specific. Everything else may be used in CbB. Of course, very little Platinum or CbB must be on the system drive.

I migrated (cloned) my 500 GB Samsung Evo to a 1 TB Samsung Evo without any problems.  I used Acronis True Image to do it and seemed to have suffered no ill effects.  You probably can too.