I am presently using two hard drives neither is an SSD but they are 7200 rpm drives. I have put my Kontak5 and BFD 2 on my OS drive and the respective libraries on my extra HDD. Should I have put the programs on the same drive that my libraries are on? As I have understood it the programs should go on the OS drive and the libraries on the extra drive. I only ask because recently I have needed to freeze some of my libraries in order to complete a project with low track counts.
 
 Thanks in advance for any thoughts on a solution to this.I am still able to get it done but only if I freeze the synths.I usually have no more than two of these types of streaming software running at any given time.

Programs on OS drive and sample libraries on a separate drive is the way to do it, so you're ok.

3 drives is the way to go:

1: OS / programs
2: Audio data
3: Sample libraries

Thanks Bonzos. I think I see another hard drive in my future.

 I had another 7200 rpm drive laying around and so on Sunday afternoon I put it in. Intensive progams are still stalling my cpu> I put all audio on one drive,all samples on another and all OS and program data on the third drive. I guess it's time to go looking for another culprit. If I load up Ozone and alloy on a few tracks along with BFD infrozen or Kontakt I get stutters in the audio unless I either A. Freeze tracksB. turn off some of the processing in my tracks. If I export a song the stutters are not in the track so the process of exporting the file doesn't seem to stall it.

 I did load up that evil Adobe and flash so I could watch you tube on my computer. Maybe its time to remove it all again.

If you are heading into the land of heavy duty sample streaming: VSL, EW HS, HB, etc., another drive would be helpful.

Even with standard 7200 rpm drives, performance can be quite decent, though load times, and general polyphony counts can benefit greatly from SSD's.

If you intend to get many libraries, spreading them out over multiple hard drives also helps greatly.

In general, if using just one computer: one drive for o/s and programs; one drive for audio files; one drive for samples (two when the number of sample libraries starts to seriously increase).

Finally, putting samples on the o/s drive is kind of a last resort, as streaming from the o/s drive is generally problematic, as that drive has to do many other things.

I only ask because recently I have needed to freeze some of my libraries in order to complete a project with low track counts.

In this scenario, track-count isn't the culprit... it's the simultaneous polyphony you're trying to stream from a single HD.  IOW, A drum track might be a single MIDI track... but it could be pulling 256 notes of disk-streaming polyphony.  


Also keep in mind that not all sample disk-streaming algorithms are equal.  ie: You can achieve far greater polyphony in Kontakt 5 than Mach 5 v3.


If you're not able to stream the amount of polyphony you require from a single (or multiple) conventional HD/s... consider using SSD.  A fast SATA-III SSD is about four times the speed of a fast conventional HD.

 

 Thanks Jim,

 So far with the three HDDs running at 7200 rpm I am getting by if I freeze some of my tracks which is no big deal but can be annoying at times. I don't need to have a lot of huge libraries. But I want the few I have to work better.

 I am looking at a future upgrade .I'll just make it work until then.

And the next step up from using an SSD might be using multiple SSDs in RAID 0 (or maybe just a faster SSD). See: 
http://www.xbitlabs.com/a...-hyperx-ssd-raid0.html

And the next step up from using an SSD might be using multiple SSDs in RAID 0

Keep in mind that two fast SSD drives in RAID-0 can saturate the SATA-III bus.
Single fast SATA-III SSD drives sustain over 500MB/Sec.  

What Jim said.

A RAID 0 setup would only be a last resort, to eke out greater performance than when streaming samples  off a single SSD. 

Practically, in such a case it would make more sense to just get a faster (which might mean a larger capacity) SSD (or maybe use a RAM disk?).