I'm building a new computer tomorrow and I'd like to know the best course of action regarding how to utilize my various hard drives. Here's what I've already decided to do:

250GB SSD - Windows 10, Sonar Platinum (main program), plugins
1TB SSD - My largest, most RAM-hungry sample libraries

What I'm not certain about is how to best utilize my 3TB HDD. I plan on saving my Sonar Platinum project files and their audio onto it, as well as the rest of my smaller and/or less used sample libraries. My question is, would it be best to create a drive partition on this HDD and separate the project files and audio from the sample libraries? Or would it not make a difference? 

I appreciate any insight. Thank you!

Chris, since Windows 64 bit can access more than 2TB, I would format it in one large partition.

tomixornot
Chris, since Windows 64 bit can access more than 2TB, I would format it in one large partition.

Thanks for commenting. So, does that mean just leave it as it is? 

Yes, just leave it as one big 3TB disk. You can still assign a drive letter to a folder if needed, much more flexible (in size) than to partition out various drives.

A partition actually creates a geographic discontinuity on the disk. The main delay in accessing or writing to a disk is the movement of the heads over the surface. If the heads need to seek a location on the disk, a partition often requires the disk to move further (takes longer time) to get to the new partition boundary from the partition it was accessing. So if you have to move from a partition near the outside of the disk to a new partition near the center of the disk, it may require a greater head movement than just accessing a location on the same partition. In other words, partitioning does not automatically improve disk access speed but often makes it longer. If you put the same data on a separate physical disk, then both disks can be active simultaneously. So two separate disks splitting the data improves throughput, but two partitions (logical disks) on the same disk will often actually slow access as, in your case, as the heads jump between a sample partition and a recording partition. In general, partitioning only makes sense to organize the data, if you want to improve the access speed, you need to add a physical disk. And you can usually accomplish the same data organization just by using a new folder/directory to a single partition. Short answer: separate you projects and other stuff by putting them in their own folders on the big drive. If you are concerned about your smaller sample libraries streaming at optimum speed, you could put them on the outer partition and force them to be on the part of the drive that moves the fastest, and if you want to tune your particular drive you can test your partition setup, but geeze...
http://www.pcworld.com/article/255224/how_to_partition_your_hard_drive_to_optimize_performance.html
 

If the OP is limited to three drives:
Assuming the 1TB "Samples" SSD isn't full... I'd put the lesser used samples on it.
The samples would load faster... and could achieve greater disk-streaming polyphony (3x).
Leave the conventional HD dedicated to projects/audio files.

Jim Roseberry
If the OP is limited to three drives:
Assuming the 1TB "Samples" SSD isn't full... I'd put the lesser used samples on it.
The samples would load faster... and could achieve greater disk-streaming polyphony (3x).
Leave the conventional HD dedicated to projects/audio files.

Just the sample libraries I designated for the SSD total about 835GB. The rest are somewhere around 300 or 400GB. So, with the drives available to me at the moment, I can't fit all of my sample libraries on SSD. However, about 90% of my projects use the libraries that are going on the SSD. The other libraries I use, just not as frequently. I think I want to save that remaining space on the SSD in case I get more libraries that I feel Ill use more often than the other ones.

If I do happen to run libraries from both the SSD and the HDD in the same project, the only thing that will be affected is the HDD libraries' speed, right? The SSD libraries will still fully benefit from being on the SSD?