When I do a bounce of a long song my CPU is around 25% and Audio Disk is around 40%.
 
Are these numbers you guys see?
 
Should I be getting disk up to 80% or CPU up to 80%?
 
I just hate waiting.
 
Smiles.

CPU spec?
What spec hard drives are you using... Are you using RAID?

Everybody has different specs.

I have no idea. I have 8 bouncy lines in the CPU thing and my hard drive is not RAID and is just one drive (D Drive) that I got from Studio Cat. I know it is not Solid State. It is 1 TB in size. I don't know the drive cache level.

Well my CPU goes up like crazy as well. I always assumed it was because I was using fakeraided mirrored disks. Normally the hard drive controller is what offloads the cpu. If I were to reduce the cpu load I would get a dedicated RAID card (it's chip would be the workhorse) rather than what is supplied on the motherboard which eats up CPU.

I was actually kinda wishing that the CPU would go up more. I'd like 'Fast Bounce' to bounce faster.

Don't go by SONAR's CPU meter, which means nothing during a bounce, but rather Windows Task Manager's CPU meter. Seeing low CPU usage there is simply an indication of a CPU that's way faster than your disk drive. That's normal.
 
If you're bouncing sampled virtual instruments, and the samples are on the same physical disk as your project, then you're making that disk drive work pretty hard. You could potentially get a substantial performance boost by adding another disk and moving your project files to it.

I've wondered about the "low-ish" processor/disk readings during a render/bounce/export, too, gswitz. Especially when, if I use, say, Adobe Premiere or After Effects, I can get 100% cpu (on all cores) for extended periods. (And on my overclocked CPU, if I forget to crank the case fan, the computer shuts down when it overheats!) I would like to see the numbers going higher on a Sonar render (assuming I remembered to turn the fan up), but I suspect it is as bitflipper says, and that the drives are the bottleneck. (Writing to drives is certainly the bottleneck with the aforementioned Adobe products, and they have all sorts of temp disk/file schemes to try and alleviate the effects.)
 
I further suspect that some plugins behave more "real-timey" and slow things down, but that's just a hunch. Would be a "fun" exercise to try a series of test renders with/without various plugins and see if the elapsed process time changes (and perhaps even if the cpu usage changes?).
 
I find that if there is any clip processing (like time stretching), processing time seems to get really drawn out, but I've yet to put a stopwatch to it. (Another "fun" exercise in the wings.)
 
I'm saving up for a SSD. All my problems (and I have a handful) will be solved! HEY, does anyone have some numbers (please state if factual or made-up) on how much faster an audio export happens with a SSD in the picture? Does the Sonar CPU go higher in this case (when the drive is mas rapido)?

bitflipper
Don't go by SONAR's CPU meter, which means nothing during a bounce, but rather Windows Task Manager's CPU meter. Seeing low CPU usage there is simply an indication of a CPU that's way faster than your disk drive. That's normal.

 
Yup process monitor all the way.

I do have a dedicated projects disk. Sounds like the drive is my constraint.

I'll consider a solid state then. Thanks!