gswitz
If you are curious how many your system can support, set loop recording on over like four measures and then play for hours. You'll get plenty of tracks. You might be able to just leave it running until you get a dropout.

try at higher sample rate and use many tracks to record the same signal. you will max out fairly quickly.
 
I think you hit a limitation inside Sonar before you ever hit a disk I/O bottleneck.  My recent experience recording 24 tracks @ 96/24 showed that I could do 3 takes only, the 4th would either drop-out at start or sometime in between, a 5th wouldn't start. Required disk I/O for that is below 25 MB/s (<20% of my benchmarked HDD speed).

@SoundRehab
 
That isn't my experience at all. I often do More than ten tracks live at double rates. I sometimes have used quad rates just to try it.
 
No, for me I'm talking about Exceeding at least 50 tracks (could be 150) at double rates. And when I do, IO seems to be the problem, not processor.
 
Like I said, the case that gets me in trouble is loop recording a piece I'm practicing. I'm not recording to mix... I'm more recording so I could listen if I think I did well. Mostly, I'm recording to track my practice time b/c it makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something. 'Look I've practiced 12 Gigs worth!'

SSD as boot drive is certainly nice (machine boots faster, applications open faster, etc).
 
A conventional HD is fast enough to sustain 100 solid/contiguous 24Bit 44.1/48k tracks of audio.
Thus, for many folks, SSD is overkill for an "Audio" drive.
If you're working at high sample-rates, especially with dense projects, SSD is a good solution.
 
Disk-streaming sample-libraries are where SSD really shines.
A fast SATA-III SSD is about 3x the speed of a conventional HD (~520MB/Sec).
That translates to 3x the disk-streaming polyphony from sample libraries.
 
If you're running a sample library like EWSO (which only allows a single drive location)... and you need massive polyphony, a cost effective solution is to put a pair of SSDs in RAID (sustains ~1000MB/Sec).
 
If your disk-streaming polyphony needs are crazy, you've also got the option of PCIe x4 (or m.2 Ultra PCIe x4) SSDs.
These drives sustain 2500-2600MB/Sec.
 
In short, let your needs define the drives used...
Choose them based on performance and space needed to accomplish your goals.
 

gswitz
@SoundRehab
 
That isn't my experience at all. I often do More than ten tracks live at double rates. I sometimes have used quad rates just to try it.
 
No, for me I'm talking about Exceeding at least 50 tracks (could be 150) at double rates. And when I do, IO seems to be the problem, not processor.
 
Like I said, the case that gets me in trouble is loop recording a piece I'm practicing. I'm not recording to mix... I'm more recording so I could listen if I think I did well. Mostly, I'm recording to track my practice time b/c it makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something. 'Look I've practiced 12 Gigs worth!'

 
gswitz, the reason you do not have any issues loop recording is this statement ...
 

gswitz
Stacks and stacks. I do it week after week.

When I start getting dropouts, I delete them all. I like measuring my practice time with them. :-P

FWIW, it tested again in detail last night with the following conclusion: loop recording is different because it creates one file per track and just displays it across several lanes; hence, i can record a vast number of tracks in loop recording mode and don't run into any issues, just as you said.
 
HOWEVER, if there are take lanes which have their audio data in different files, then it involves much more disk IO and Sonar quickly gives up (in my case when recording the 4th or 5th take of these 24x 96/24 channels). Disk reading is only at max. 25 MB/s (very far from the benchmarked 115-120MB/s I get for 1 GB files)
 
the SOLUTION would be a simple change in Sonar i.e. not to read any takes from the disk for tracks which are currently recording. what's the point anyway? you can't do comping while recording, and if you could, who would???