I have a boatload of memory (32G) but audio is still read from disk, looking at one of my larger projects the audio files are less than 2GB total. Is there a way to tell Sonar to cache as much of a project as possible in memory instead of reading it from disk?
I'd like to be able to say, cache up to 8GB before going to the disk. Is that possible?
 

That has never been an option that I'm aware of, the audio has always streamed directly from the hard drive.
 
there are samplers which can do that, but to my knowledge it has never been an option in Sonar.

It would also mean quite a delay before playback would start each and every time...not really a great idea.

You can specify the read cache in preferences but I've never set it anywhere near that large and I think it means it will start reading anew everytime you press play.

The other thing is, there's not much tangible benefit. Hard drives have been fast enough for high track counts at high sample rates for a long time now. So it's a feature barely worth coding.
 

Not to mention in case of a power outage, at least audio files on disk will be recoverable. If everything (including new recordings) was kept in RAM they would all be lost.

You could try turning off the Windows paging file in the device manager.

You can switch Windows disk caching on somewhere in Sonar's preferences. Or, more accurately, tell Sonar not to bypass caching.

I used it for a while as an experiment and yes, if you've sufficient RAM to contain the project it's seriously fast. After the initial run through disk activity drops to nearly nothing unless you're recording.

There is of course the risk of losing recorded audio if the PC or Sonar crashes during recording and disk caching is active. On the other hand I've had crashes once in a while where audio being recorded at the point of the crash wasn't on the disk, or not as a recoverable file using Window's tools, when Windows caching was off so how much of a saviour writing direct to disk really is I don't know.