As I have still been cleaning on my machine and reading these boards, I've learned and can almost bet I have things i.e. samples installed in the wrong place. I have a toshiba usb 1 tb external hard drive. What are some of the things that could go to certain drives that should have an affect on the way SONAR run? I hope wording correctly.
 
Thanks

most people split their setup acoss 3 disks:
1 for OS and Sonar installation
1 for sample content (which doesn't change unless you upgrade or buy new toys) and
1 for the actual sonar projects where all the audio files are recorded to and hence content frequently changes
 
so you could try putting your sample content on that external disk, but I would only do that if you have a USB3 drive, with an older USB2 external HD you might be facing really looooooong load times for VSTs with high sample content

Well, nobody really knows percentages of folks with 1 drive, versus 2, or 3 or more, but if you can split things per the post abovem, if you have 3 drives available, that would be great.
 
If you have only a single hard drive, you will have some performance issues, because the operating system, the Sonar program and any loaded plugins, any loaded sample files, and reading and writing of projects, would all fight for the same physical drive read/write heads.
 
So, most folks get at least 1 additional drive, a smaller percentage pick up a 3rd, less than that pick up a 4th, etc.   At some point, there are some diminishing returns and it just will stop giving you performance benefits to keep adding hard drives and further splitting things across them.
 
I happen to run with 2 main drives, and I split things as follows:
 
Primary Drive (C:) - Operating system, program files (including plugins), the hidden Windows folders (application data, etc.)
 
Data Drive (D:) - My user folders (documents, pictures, downloads, music, desktop), All of my sample libraries (Kontakt 5, Session Drummer 3, Battery 3, etc.), as well as any Cakewalk Content (projects, templates, documentation, global audio, Perfect Space impulses, etc.)
 
As noted in the other post above, the other poster has an additional drive, and they split things I have combined on my Data drive to their 2nd and 3rd drives.
 
The whole point of any of the above is to reduce/eliminate performance bottlenecks caused by fighting to access different places on a single drive at the same time.  So, as I record, I will read and write a bunch of files to my cakewalk project's folder, principally audio clips, and I also have to deal with loading samples for instruments such as Kontakt 5.
 
I could achieve better performance by adding that 3rd drive, but since everything is running OK for me with the 2 I have set up, I won't worry about it for now.
 
I also have the benefit of having 32 GB of memory in my computer, so a lot of samples just get completely loaded into memory and then they aren't a performance issue having to get loaded from the drive like they would if I had less memory, like 4 GB.  Then I would likely need to add that 3rd drive, like the other poster.
 
I hope that helps explain things a bit, Greg.
 
Glad you are asking questions here in the forums, and reading, and such.  YouTube also has a bunch of free videos you can watch for doing things in Sonar, or just for general mixing and recording information.  Cakewalk TV has a lot of that too.
 
Hope things are getting better for you for your system and for your knowledge level for Sonar.  Keep posting issues in the forums, and as you see, folks will indeed invest time and effort into assisting you with working things out.
 
Bob Bone
 

robert_e_bone
The whole point of any of the above is to reduce/eliminate performance bottlenecks caused by fighting to access different places on a single drive at the same time.  So, as I record, I will read and write a bunch of files to my cakewalk project's folder, principally audio clips, and I also have to deal with loading samples for instruments such as Kontakt 5.
 

 
Bob and FreeFly, thank you for the help. I'm thinking because I haven't split anything, that is causing performance issues. Bob it's interesting you put your user files on the second drive. I'm guessing that comes from C>Users>user name folder. Not the entire  set user folders (documents, pictures, downloads, music, desktop) as in the "guest user" and the cloud or One Drive what ever they're calling it. 
 
I'm expecting 8g RAM I ordered for this machine. I have a 32gb thumb drive, I though about putting projrct files on, but I don't the average project size. I'll have to look at this.
 
Bob what do you do with the common file folder leave it or move it too?
 
Thanks to both of you for the help 
 

For me, I changed the Location in the properties for the various user folders I altered to use my 2nd drive.
 
So, if you open a Windows Explorer (what you use to look at folders and files in Windows), look on the left side at the Navigation Tree.  Then, right-click on each of the following folders (Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Videos), and click on Properties, then on Location, and set the location to wherever you want Windows to point to for that data.  I had existing data prior to setting new locations for those folders, so I first went to the new drive and created new empty folders for each of those, then went through the above steps, then did copy/paste to populate the new locations from the original data that was back on the C: drive.  After making sure all was cool, I then emptied out the original folders back on the C: drive.
 
Bob Bone
 

I was doing some copying and pasting. I saw that I had a lot of junk so I'm going to sift through all of that.
 
Thanks Bob

robert_e_bone
For me, I changed the Location in the properties for the various user folders I altered to use my 2nd drive.
 
So, if you open a Windows Explorer (what you use to look at folders and files in Windows), look on the left side at the Navigation Tree.  Then, right-click on each of the following folders (Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Videos), ...

Hey Bob, thanks for this.  I have always moved the Windows "My Xxxx" and Download folders (and Mozilla profiles, etc.) to a user data partition, but it never occurred to me I could do the same with the Desktop.  I just freed up 5.6 gb on my smallish SSD so that was welcome.  My Desktop can surely use some housekeeping but this was quick.
 
I have tried in the past to symolic link the entire Users folder but that was painful and I gave up.  There is still too much user stuff on C: like AppData that I'd prefer was somewhere else.

It seemed like the least painful way to be 'purist' in my goal to split things for performance reasons.
 
In reality, I had enough room on my C: drive to keep things like documents and pictures there, and they weren't being accessed while running Sonar, but since I eventually picked up a solid-state drive to replace a failed C drive, it all worked out just fine.
 
Anyways, glad you have some new stuff to try.
 
Bob Bone
 

I'm up in the air weather to use a 32 gig thumb drive or partitioning a drive for projects. What would be your thoughts? I will eventually get another drive.