What a mess Windows installation has become. I miss the notion of installing something by way of a folder copy ... to wherever you want.

My guess is that most people use a system (laptop, desktop, etc) where they are the sole user's of that system. But the whole installation process is predicated around multiple users in multiple roles.

All those roaming folders and local folders and bewildering registry items. I'm a software engineer of 30 years and I can't believe it's come to this.

Anyway, my experience has been that it's best to leave the programs installed on the (default) C: drive. I have had success doing otherwise but it seems like you get caught out somewhere along the line of doing so (perhaps more so if you install older applications).

But for "everything else" that gets installed (VSTs, soft synths, loops, samples, etc), put on a separate drive. Usually you are prompted for the path for these if you select the "custom installation", but as someone pointed out earlier these may need to be set elsewhere ahead of time.

Good luck!

Hey, soens. Do you use Sonar and those other programs regularly in the same "session" (as in between boot up and shut down)?
 
Because if you have programs you don't ever anticipate needing while making music might I suggest you set up a "dual boot" scheme where Sonar and everything you need for music is on one drive and everything else is on another. So when you want to make music you boot to the Sonar drive (and you probably want to use your SSD for music because it's likely to benefit from the extra speed far more than other programs except video editing stuff or modern video games).
 
Bit of a pain having to change your boot order all the time to get at one installation or the other but that depends on how you use the system. Might be tolerable and really isn't a huge deal.
 
Now this is based on my laymen's concept of how that would work... which in my mind BOTH drives would be seen as the C drive depending on which drive you boot to. I could be wrong on that.
 
Also scook has posted LOTS of info about using "MKLINK" to trick Windows/systems into thinking certain files and entries are on one drive when they are actually on another. I am not sure if that would help entirely (or at all) in this situation but at the very least might help you move a whole bunch of stuff to other drives that don't need to physically be on the C drive to work BUT still be accessible on the C drive (just via an MKLINK which then retreives whatever it is from the linked drive).
 
Just some ramblings.
 
/not a tech
 

VariousArtist
What a mess Windows installation has become. ...
All those roaming folders and local folders and bewildering registry items. I'm a software engineer of 30 years and I can't believe it's come to this.

Thank you! !!! Most of it makes no real sense though I assure you - it is by design.
 
I'm not into multiboot systems but I do have multiple laptops so eventually I may resign to using one for DAW only and the other for everything else. Time to buy another power strip.

I don't think I want to go back from using SSD drives for my C drive. I still have one W7 computer with a 1 TB 7200 drive and it just seems to take way too long to boot compared to my others with SSD. And it's been optimized for a DAW so not much else running in it. It's my old DAW but from time to time I'll run it and mess about with experimental stuff before I use it on my main machine. I'm trying the demo for Cubase 8.5 right now. But boy, it's noticeably slower than any of my other machines.
 
I even have an SSD in my little Asus Netbook which is a pathetic 1.8 Atom processor, 2 GB ram, XP 32 bit. It is super snappy to work with.  It can only have one drive so I used a 240 GB and it's only at 35% right now. It's my playback laptop for gigs so loaded with a lot of Wave files, But I also use it for traveling and it has Sonar 8.5 on board.
 
I have mostly 240 GB SSD for C drives now but my office desktop only has a 120 GB and it seems fine. It also has 4 TB of other storage with 3 other regular 7200 drives.  It has Sonar X1 LE which I never use. I did a bare bones install sans content and demos.

OK, just had the system reinstalled on a 512GB drive so no need to migrate, link, or redirect. My advice is don't buy a system with a 128GB OS drive. Pure silliness IMO.