I recently scored a 4 TB external storage device.....How can i incorporate this into my daw to free up some hard drive space on my computer and have it work with my sonar projects? I dont want to just hook it up without getting some advice on how i can utilize this properly with sonar.  Thx, Ken

Without knowing more about the capability and connection of the external the only thing anyone can safely say for this drive is to move all of your files that do not require immediate access to it for backup storage. That is what these huge drives are really designed for. Any project file that you are not using can be moved for sure, just move them back to a fast drive when you need to open them. You might be able to get acceptable real time performance using your USB 3 or eSATA if the drive will connect that way.

This is what I have......hope it helps
http://www.buffalotech.com/products/desktop-hard-drives/drivestation/drivestation-duo-1
 
 

I would try copying many gigs, like more than twenty and report the MB per second transfer rate at the end. Modern drives can be confusing for sustained transfer rate because of ssd caches. Then based on the amount of data you need to write per minute, calculation of sample rate bit depth and track count, determine if it will do the job.

I use my external drive solely for backups of project files and sample libraries. Speed doesn't matter for that, just bulk capacity. Although there is no direct benefit to DAW activities, it does provide peace of mind. I only have 1TB, though. If I had a 4TB drive, I'd also be making backups of my entire system on it.

I could use a little education on the best way to utilize this thing....is there anything I can do to boost the performance of my computer by moving things to the storage device?

In general, a computer that has access to more than one magnetic drive (physically different drives, not a partitioned one) can perform faster, since the heads are locked onto arms and the entire drive (regardless of size or number of platters) can only read/write one file at a time. This is the same reasoning for the common recommendation of system/program drives being different from data drives. System/program drives should be the fastest drive possible, and often need to read quickly, with less writing (why SSDs excel here).
 
The best advice is what Geoff mentioned. Actually copy/paste a bunch of data to the new drive and see what its actual performance is. You could also copy a few project folders (or even "save as" from SONAR) to it and actually test to see how it performs working on a project that is resident on it.

I'm afraid you storage is a bit of a black box in more ways than one. The transfer speed listed, is just the transfer rate of USB 3 (5GB /sec) and might not have anything to do with measures like the sustained read or write speeds of the controller and enclosed drives  that would be germane as to whether you could run it as a real time audio streaming device. The rpm of the drives is not even listed in the specs I found, but even slow drives set up as a two drive RAID 0 array which this supports should be pretty fast. It does sound like you might get away with it, but as others have said the best thing to do is to try to set up one drive as the Sonar project folder for as big a project as you expect to work on, copy the project there and play with the copy to see if you can make it fail. Some of the audio stress test suites using that drive might also be useful tests.
 
There are some simple drive test utilities that can help you test the speed, but there may be problems using them if the controller in your unit hides the drives themselves. At any rate, what you are looking for is the speed of the unit as a whole (controller, connection, and drive) so anything that will measure actual movement of data to and from the drive will be fine.
https://ttcshelbyville.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/test-your-hard-drive-speed-with-windows-7s-device-manager/
 

GUIDANCE REQUESTED

I need to revive my dormant post....
Could someone give a detailed somewhat step by step method on how they utilize their external drive for sonar files to free up c drive disk space. I'm lost on what program files I can move to the external drive, how to direct sonar to utilize this drive.....without sending my smooth running experience into a nosedive. What I need is a tutorial of sorts, and I'm sure many people would benefit from this. I'm running out of c drive! HELLLLP

Maybe it's not Sonar files that need to be removed. Take an inventory of our drive. Remove old program you never need. Run Window disk cleanup.