New PC, new Sonar, getting it right

Your old hard drive might be an IDE drive which will not be able to connect with the new, most certain, SATA hard drives.
The SATA drives are quicker and less hassle than the old IDE drives.
 
A 250Gb partition is fine for Windows as your C drive.  Then I would do a 500Gb D partition for your program installs and then the rest for an E partition for downloads etc.
 
A second drive could hold your Cakewalk Content and synth plugins, doing an E and F partition.
 
Scott's book Sonar X2 Power! has good recommends using 3 hard drives for Sonar to work at a top level.  He recommends putting all your synth plugins on a 3rd drive, if possible.  He is working on the new Sonar X3 Power book.
 
See Scott at http://www.digifreq.com/digifreq/
 
 
 

I have OS and applications on 1 drive, and sound libraries and projects on a 2nd drive, and have no performance bottlenecks.
 
It is largely a matter of choice.  Some methodologies yield better performance, but I think the biggest yields are really keep OS and applications separate from sample libs and projects.  (and by separate, I mean separate physical drives, not just separate partitions).
 
Bob Bone

For speed sake, I recommend getting an SSD for your boot/OS drive, and using regular 7200rpm sata drives for everything else. I have a 120GB SSD, which is enough for Windows 8.1, Sonar X3 (base program), and a few other applications. All other libraries and such go on a seconds 1TB drive. I use that drive for my projects as well.
 
With all the holiday sales going around, you should have no problem finding a moderately sized SSD for a reasonable price. I recently found a 128GB one for $65 online. You'll be happy you did.

 
 I can certainly see the benefits of SSD in looking at performance compared to the more standard SATA 7200rpm drives. I have some reservation though in going to one because of info I have heard that may not be confirmed. SSD seems to wear out but in a different way, mainly in either a complete failure or a reduced memory capacity. I have read that after 2 years an SSD is on shaky ground. I would hope that this information is wrong.
 
 If I'm only going to get 2 years out of an SSD drive, then I'm not feeling the love entirely. Can anyone here confirm or deny this? At least we can reasonably expect 5 years plus with a good platter drive. I have seen some go for much longer than that. A percentage of the people who have bought SSD report failures that seem to be much more common than a good 7200 rpm drive.
 
 

I happened to notice recently that Seagate, which USED to have 5-year warranties on their regular drives, have changed that to now only 2-years.
 
Even so, since I got SCORCHED with a 6-month failure on the expensive SSD that I bought, I too will be sticking to regular SATA III drives for a long while.
 
Bob Bone
 

Blades
For what it's worth, except from possibly an organizational perspective, I can't think of a good reason to separate applications from the OS, especially if just separated by a partition, which will gain nothing in performance.  Projects/wavs and sample libraries would ideally be located on a drive that is not the OS and applications because then you have a completely different drive head to read them and there's no competition.
 
SSD drives are definitely a LOT faster but at a price premium.  The jury is still out on long-term use, especially if you are writing and deleting a lot.  There are utilities to help optimize things like this - notably from Intel for their drives.
 
Hope this short burst of available time/info is helpful.

The other main reason for keeping your samples on a separate drive is of course to do with backups.
 
Backing up an OS drive that contains many Gigabytes of Sample data will take a lot longer than if they were stored on another drive.

On MEGA-advantage with SSD's (especially on an OS drive) is that they are SILENT. The more moving parts = the more NOISE. Which is also why I have only a 1GB vid card that has no fan. And I do backup my Samples/Cake projects on another drive periodically. The OS drive isn't really catastrophic to me if it fails. I bought fans that are silent/or I can control the speed of PLUS a soundproofed case.
 
All things to keep in mind if you really are committed to doing it right.

+1 With the above mentioned info.
 
A few points I want to clarify from the above:

1. A magnetic hard disk drive (HDD) has fingers that move over the platters, so even partitioned, they can only read/write one file at a time (they move as one unit only). The "separate drives" comments above mean separate HHDs, not separate partitions (partitions still compete with each other).
2. I am unclear of your system configuration. SATA 3 (6Gb/sec) drives (both SSD and HDD) will perform fastest. HDDs should run at a 7200rpm spindle speed minimum (do not go with "green" drives).
3. If you have never owned an SSD, be sure to research them first. This thread discusses general uses/caretaking requirements for them and is also linked to a similar thread. In general, the highest disk use comes from the OS/programs drive, so this is the optimal placement for an SSD.

 

>  If you want to dual boot for different use installations (like business apps vs music apps), then "why not" but again, not going to gain anything here for performance.
 
Not true. You will gain performance and mainly stability. Whether it is worth it of course is your decision.
 
More software = more services, tasks, schedule tasks, processes, libraries/DLLs,registry entries, bloated registry, chance of conflicts, fragmentation, more/larger databases for indexing.
More software = less stability and more chance of bugs.
More software = increased dependencies on other software
More software = more maintenance such as updates.
More software = slower machine.
More software = harder to diagnose issues.
More software = more work for the OS.
 
In fact the most stable machine is probably the one you never switch on.
 
Plenty of examples here... but I'll pick out a few...
 
Search indexer service is really useful in an office environment but you want to avoid that in a DAW environment.

NVidia 3D Physics engine probably not a great idea on your DAW partition but if you wanna play GTA then maybe on your games partition.

Or you would be mad run Skype whilst using your DAW.


Many clued up businesses lock down their PC's to stop people installing software at will (i.e. most people only need office etc) so they don't install bundles of screensavers, and general useless cr*p. Those that don't do this often end up with high support costs and their machines break and slow down to a halt eventually. MS has built this into all their machines (it's called group policy).It's windows so you got either to keep the panes squeaky clean or keep 'em dirty :)
 
The key to a stable and fast system is installing the software you need rather than the software you want. If something is useless get rid of it. In effect you are sandboxing everything to the overall task required by running multiple OS's.

If you have all your data on one dedicated drive partition and stick to it I don't see the issue. It also helps with the backup strategy.


I certainly don't fragment my data (i.e. samples on one partition, projects on another), as it makes little difference to performance nowadays and adds complexity. Also putting data on partitions where applications live makes life less easy (of course all the defaults encourage you to do this for some reason, but that's windows for you). One data partition to rule them all is my view.

No X3 is standalone

Bob Bone:
 
"You will achieve better performance splitting the OS/apps and your data files across multiple physical drives."
 
Understood. I'm just thinking that a 1TB drive seems like a lot of space for just my OS and apps. I'm going to have the Sonar instruments etc on a different physical drive, but if I create a partition on the main drive for separate non-Sonar stuff, I assume that's not going to cause any performance issues? 

Having non-Sonar stuff in a separate partition on your primary hard drive will not cause a performance issue.
 
Bob Bone
 

 If all you're doing is creating images then a 5200 rpm drive will be just fine for that. Even a usb connected drive will do.
 
No matter what kind of a drive you end up with, imaging all of your drives periodically is always a good idea. 
 
 I image all three of my drives onto one  3tb usb drive. I am thinking of going to a second drive for images because my sample libraries are  so large. My 2nd drive which I store projects on isn't so large ;) If you only record for yourself you likely won't need nearly as large a drive for your personal projects.  I'll probably never fill a 3tb drive for projects. Unplugging the image drive when not in use will make it last longer and when that nasty thunder storm suddenly rolls in and lightening strikes your rig your image drive won't be attached.

robert_e_bone
Having non-Sonar stuff in a separate partition on your primary hard drive will not cause a performance issue.
 
Bob Bone
 

Please note post #18. It's installing the app on the OS that can slow it down (the DLL's, the libraries, the registry etc etc etc as per post #18), not where the app is. You decide whether this is important to you or not (it really depends on the software and how much you have, and the use cases). Bloat can be a real issue.
 
You would be a little eccentric for instance to install Adobe Photoshop, a DAW and Visual studio next to each other.