Anderton

vintagevibe

mixmkr
  Seems I NEVER hear people screaming about Windows Updates.  

Windows file belong on the C drive.  Data files do not.

I definitely agree with that, if for no other reason than you can just back up an entire data drive in one fell swoop.

And keep your system drive images a manageable size.

arachnaut

YouDontHasToCallMeJohnson
...
After years of pros advising everybody to keep the OS disk small, and put samples,... on separate drives it would seem that the software publishers would have gotten a clue. ...

And who thought putting VST3 files into the common\VST folder is a good idea? A place NO ONE would ever suspect and therefore never backup.
...

1) Yes, we really need the OS and installers to have better support for putting resources in the best places in a system with SSDs and a mix of hard drives. It's about time something serious be done about this.
 
2) The VST 3 spec states the preferred locations:
 
"On Windows platform, the host application expects VST 3 Plug-ins to be located in:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Priority   Location             Path                                       Comment
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1          Global               /Program Files/Common Files/VST3/          native bitdepth: 32bit Plug-in on 32bit OS, 64bit on 64bit OS)
1          Global               /Program Files (x86)/Common Files/VST3/    32bit Plug-ins on 64bit Windows
2          Application          $APPFOLDER/VST3/ 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note: The host recursively scans these folders at startup in this order (Global/Application). "

That's one of the weird things about the CCC. It's the first installer I've ever encountered that gives you an option to change the default installation path for VST3. Even if in its development the CCC next allowed you to download the installers and then ran them as if you had selected the installer yourself to give you advanced options.

Paul P
 
TreeSizeFree is great for finding out what's taking up all the space.
 

Thanks very much for this link. After reading about the product on their website, I downloaded and installed it, and discovered that the pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys were gobbling up over 26GB of my 128GB SSD C: drive. After much Googling and reading, I managed to get 22 GB of it back!
Also, just a comment re this thread. I can never understand why people need to turn intelligent threads into pissing competitions. Surely we can agree to disagree with respect.
 
Greg
 

I have one drive, a terabyte Western Digital, with a fixed pagefile of 1024.  If you calculate the throughput of that drive, it is like a zillion tracks, more than you'd ever use.  The chokepoint [in my experience] is the CPU, not the drive, so methinks you guys are "getting musician" on me.  One drive means I can make a single system-image once a month with Win7 Backup utility, and run Richcopy to scan the whole drive for changes whenever I get paranoid.  Since Richcopy simply makes a copy, I don't have to worry about some damn backup software's proprietary file structure nonsense.  I have successfully recovered from multiple hard drive failures.  I never have dropouts that I cannot attribute to the CPU running out of steam.
 
* "getting musician", transitive phrase, attitude best exemplified in the movie Spinal Tap as regard the Marshall amp's ability to "go to 11".

GregGraves
I have one drive, a terabyte Western Digital, with a fixed pagefile of 1024.  If you calculate the throughput of that drive, it is like a zillion tracks, more than you'd ever use.

This might be true if you computer was doing nothing but tracking.  I don't know how often or under what circumstances Windows accesses the OS drive, but the minute it does it puts a stick in the wheels of your recording by hijacking the hard drive head and moving it somewhere else.  Once Windows is done, you then have to bring the head back to where it was to continue your recording.  If you have a separate drive for tracking, and it's not fragmented, its head can hopefully remain positioned for recording.  If you're recording multiple tracks I imagine the head is already dancing around writing the various track files even without Windows (or other background tasks) interrupting.  For similar reasons it's a lot faster to move large amounts of data from one drive to another than within a same drive.
 
If you look at the file transfer rates while you're saving something to disc, you'll see that you get nowhere near the ideal throughput for a drive.  You'll also see that it's a lot faster to move stuff between drives.

You must be talking about recording 4 or more tracks at once.  I do everything myself so never record more than a stereo track, one at a time.  By functioning solo, I find that I am never late to a session, and can drink just as many beers as I want without anyone giving me grief about being so blotto.

It is not just about being able to get X number of tracks playing back at the same time.  When you audition instruments, loading the samples can be slow with a slow drive. For instance, I originally installed Komplete 10 on a MD, but auditioning instruments was so slow that I usually just gave up after loading a few. Since I moved the samples to an SSD, auditioning instruments became much faster, and no longer feels like it interferes with the process. It now only takes a few seconds to load even large instruments.

I see 3 concerns with defaulting to the C: automagically and without parental control.
 
1) SSD sizes when used as C: -- Sure, they'll grow, but SW will outpace them. Already (as noted above) many of us are forgoing 'hibernate' (say RAM size -32GB sir?)  and disabling default paging to the SSD which should hold either really hot data or static data. SSD's are the WoRM (write occasionally, read all the time). I'm OK with a 120GB boot C: SSD and have about 65GB free even with SPro installed, but its a very new system and growing fast.
 
2) Speed of access -- This is marketing fluff, nuf said. With 16GB of RAM, even page file accesses to the HDD are rare. I'm still checking streaming of long audio stuf simultaneously, but I'm not expecting problems and have my fingers crossed. I can't believe that a SSD would help in any case.
 
3) BOOT DISK is for the OS! --- With this whole UEFI (I just got upgraded), I actually now get to spend time wondering how best to organize my system. Even M$oft advises us mere mortals to separate our data and 'programs' (not to mention all the add-ons like VSTs, etc). My perspective is a program like Sonar is data! It is really useful for manipulating other data, but it is not the OS needed to run the machine itself.
 
I keep my Boot disk small so I can back it up frequently and easily. Even just a BU to a fast HDD is ~20 min. The 500 GB partitions for my music stuff is overnight. So at that point, I probably BU all the other partitions (~2TB) so thats another couple days. It needed to get done, but not on some timeline based on Sonar releases. So, the C: gets a weekly update from a stable system to a SSD and a HDD. I don't need to really re-write a bunch of small samples and even worse the dir structures associated with lots of tiny files, most of which I will never even peruse. These things belong in archives. RAM isn't an issue any more (for awhile at least).
 
I vote for lean and mean. I'm not aware of any advantage of putting the .exe on a SSD vs a HDD.
 
BUing a UEFI boot image is not quite as easy as it once was. I already have a 220GB SSD available as well and have set it up as an optional boot source. The C: drive gets lots of stuff dumped on it, cleaning is risky and really boring. I'm not BUing my C: because of Sonar but all the other 3 updates a day I already get to choose about and reluctantly accept. If I didn't put it on my C:, it has no business being there. If it can't be moved then that is an installation problem.
 

GregGraves
You must be talking about recording 4 or more tracks at once.  I do everything myself so never record more than a stereo track, one at a time.  By functioning solo, I find that I am never late to a session, and can drink just as many beers as I want without anyone giving me grief about being so blotto.

 
Yes I agree. Depending on your scope of recording you may only need one drive. However down the track a bit you may morph into an orchestral arranger requiring greater demands on your system drive.
 
A good analogy would be your beer. Right now you most likely have all your beer stored in one fridge and you're happy with that. But what if you branch out into other concoctions such as bourbon, whiskey, wines, sherry, moonshine etc. You probably wouldn't want all of that mixed up and stuffed in the one fridge. You'd want it organised for ease of access and less demand on the motor drives. Just don't buy "green" fridges because if you don't open the door often enough they will idle down and turn your booze warm.
 
Cheers
Greg