I currently have SONAR Platinum installed on my hard drive.  Would I see a performance boost if I move the app to a SSHD?
Can I just move the folders Content & Projects to the SSHD?

Not so much from the Sonar app itself.
Sonar would load faster but the biggest improvement would be if the sample libraries are on the SSD.  I got a huge reduction in project load times when I moved AD2 and Dim Pro samples to an SSD.
Most people keep their working folders (projects) on the HDD. You won't see much improvement by moving project audio to an SSD. Even a slow HDD has enough bandwidth to handle many, many audio tracks unless you are working with 96/192Khz sample rates.

It's also worth mentioning that SSD drives run cooler, and therefore quieter . . . not so much of a "performance boost", but if you're recording with microphones in the same room as your computer, less fan noise is nice.

noynekker
It's also worth mentioning that SSD drives run cooler, and therefore quieter . . . not so much of a "performance boost", but if you're recording with microphones in the same room as your computer, less fan noise is nice.

That surprises me. For those fans that are in a temperature sensitive speed control environment, most seem to have the CPU temperature (or GPU if it is on a video card) as the control sensor, not the air temperature in the case. The contribution of a hard drive heat dissipation to the temperature in the CPU would be minimal except in a very confined space like a laptop. The SSD of course has no moving parts, so it does not make any noise itself, but mechanical drive noise is not usually a big contributor to the total noise output of a computer, which mostly has to do with PSU fans, followed by case fans, followed by processing cooling units. 

Thanks!  I will look at moving the sample libraries to the SSD. 

 

slartabartfast

noynekker
It's also worth mentioning that SSD drives run cooler, and therefore quieter . . . not so much of a "performance boost", but if you're recording with microphones in the same room as your computer, less fan noise is nice.

That surprises me. For those fans that are in a temperature sensitive speed control environment, most seem to have the CPU temperature (or GPU if it is on a video card) as the control sensor, not the air temperature in the case. The contribution of a hard drive heat dissipation to the temperature in the CPU would be minimal except in a very confined space like a laptop. The SSD of course has no moving parts, so it does not make any noise itself, but mechanical drive noise is not usually a big contributor to the total noise output of a computer, which mostly has to do with PSU fans, followed by case fans, followed by processing cooling units. 

Your point is well taken, and I hadn't realized that by far the majority of noise comes from cooling the CPU and Graphics card. From another site:
A typical SSD produces about 3 watts of heat, compared to about 12 watts for an HDD. But if you compare that to the 90 to 130 watts of a typical high-end desktop CPU or the 200 watts of a typical high-end desktop graphics card, it's not going to be significant.
 
So . . . as microapp says, the only real SSD performance advantage for the OP is Sonar start up, and sample load times, though I will add, it's nice that Windows boot up time is faster as well.
 

Wait one minute,  a SSD and a SSHD are two different types of Hard Drives. 
 

What is an SSD? What is an SSHD?

SSD stands for solid-state drive. It's basically the same as a USB flash drive, but on a bigger, much faster scale. Unlike a traditional mechanical hard disk, an SSD has no moving parts. Storage is provided by memory chips instead of spinning magnetic platters. See all SSD reviews
 
SSHD stand for solid-state hybrid drive. It's a traditional hard disk with a small amount of solid-state storage built in, typically 8GB. The drive appears as a single device to Windows (or any other operating system), and a controller chip decides which data is stored on the SSD and what's left on the HDD.
 
Learn more here ~~>  SSD -vs - SSHD

@Jesse G . . . SSHD (hybrid drive), not SSD . . . yes I missed that detail from the OP . . . aren't SSHD drives mostly used in Laptops where space is an issue ? Yikes, guess I should know better than getting involved in hardware discussions when I'm clearly a software guy

If the OP is truly debating a hybrid drive, definitely research specifics on the drive. I have never used one and the 8GB cache is more to give the OS boot a jump in load time (and not sure how configurable it is by the user). 8GB is also rather small (miniscule by audio sample standards), so the drive itself is really going to perform as a generic HDD (magnetic hard disk drive), which is not going to gain anything.

The key to optimizing drive config for Sonar is having sample libraries on a separate drive, be it HDD, SSHD, or SSD. HDDs (or any spinning disk with moving heads) have a relatively long seek time which is the time to mive the head to the right track plus the time for the desired block to spin under the head. If the samples are on the project drive, this has to occur constantly if the samples are streaming off the disk plus the seek has to occur for the audio as well so the disk is continuously thrashing to get at both the audio and samples.
If the samples are on a separate drive, the head will remain in the same place and several tracks are most likely buffered, so no thrashing.
 
I believe that in the SSHD, the SSD part buffers the most often used files. I do not think it is large enough on any hybrid drive I have seen to hold VSTi samples.
So essentially, the SSHD is working as an HDD. This is still preferable to samples stored on the project or OS drive but will not be as fast as a true SSD.
 
Mettelus is correct in that the SSHD is largely a gimmick to make the OS appear to run faster. SSDs are so cheap now ($80 for 250GB) that I would not even consider an SSHD.