Hello all, and thank you in advance for any input you may give to a newb starting out.
My question is....
 
How should I configure my hard drives, and is it really necessary to purchase a SSD hard drive?
 
I have a 1TB Western digital hard drive. I want to get at least one or two more, depending.
I know that one hard drive should be for operating system and DAW, and another should be for recording and saving audio. But Im inputting Pod farm on all my guitar tracks as plug ins. Which leads me to think maybe I should get a third one for plug ins and VSTs since I will be using plug ins a lot. Is that an option. If so, how would I go about transferring the VST plug ins to the third hard drive. Or do I really need a third one. Could I just put all my Plug ins on the second hard drive with the saved recordings and run with a duel hard drive set up.
 
Again thank you very much for the help. Ive tried to read stuff about this online, but instead wanted to talk to the intelligent people on this forum. You guys have never steered me wrong  You guys are the tits.
 
-Vokalzz-
 
 

There is no need to put plug-ins on a dedicated drive. Generally plug-ins would be located with the rest of the programs on the C drive. A third drive is useful for sample libraries for plug-ins that stream samples from disk. FYI, none of the Cakewalk synths stream samples. Typically plug-ins which have large sample libraries provide a way to install and relocate the samples on a different drive from the plug-in.

Bump to remove spammer topic title from home page.

Scook, thank you for the reply.
 
So, If I used one HDD for operating system and DAW and the other for recording and sample library sounds. Do you think this set up would run smoothly? in your opinion?
 
Forgot to mention my specs:
 
Intel i5 processor
850 watt power supply
8Gb of ram
Focusrite pro 40 interface firewire 400
2 western digital HDD 7200 rpm
 
Also, how do you determine if a particular set of plug ins are steaming or not. I have pod farm 2.5
Would that be a streaming plug in. Im a little confused here.
 
 

Effects don't stream, only sampling soft synths stream data from disk (if they are configured to do so). Pod Farm is a collection of effects so like all effects plug-ins are loaded completely into memory. Examples of synths that take advantage of streaming are Kontakt, BSD and Vienna Symphonic Library.
 
From what has been described so far, install everything related to the DAW (i.e. all software including plug-ins and samples) on the C drive and use the second hard drive for data including audio projects. Use per-project audio folders to keep the recording audio in the project folders. This should give the best performance for a two drive setup.

Vokalzz -

I've had a two HD set up for years on my laptop and it's been great. As scook suggests, your C Drive is the place to put the OS and all installed applications, from MS Word and Excel through all of your music applications including VSTs.

Also as scook suggests, put all of your songs and their wave files etc. in per project folders on your second drive.

In addition, I keep all of my installer files on my second drive. You could save those off to an external drive, but I sometimes refer to them so it's convenient to have the installers within reach.

One other item on this I would strongly suggest is for you to obtain an application like Acronis, which allows you to conveniently back up everything to external hard drive(s). After you've spent countless hours capturing your creativity it would be a heartbreak to lose the whole set up. Acronis enables you to restore to your latest back up point with just a few clicks. I've needed to do that more than a dozen times over not that long of a time frame. You can do something simple like get a bad install or something undesired installs itself in to your system and you'd need to be an IT expert to figure out how to unhose your machine. And then of course there's always the potential of an unexpected hard drive crash losing everything on the drive. With Acronis, you can just restore to your last back up point and you are back to where you were before the problem.

In my desktop I use 3 drives. 
C 500 gig 7200 RPM = OS  and installed software. 
G 1TB 7200 RPM = Data and copies of all software executable files ( great mind think alike lawajava :) 
F  2 TB = Backup drive 
 
the 3rd drive is where I point my back ups using USease back up and manual  "save as" for important projects, Then all is also dumped to a external drive once every few weeks or when I think it's time. At the end of the day there is always 2 versions up to date each on a separate drive, with older versions on the external. I generally have Sonar projects files on 2 other computer as well for travel and live recording..

I'd nix Acronis and get the free version of Macrium Reflect.
In fact, I did nix Acronis about a year ago and have never looked back.
Marcium is faster and more trustworthy in my opinion and it's free.

Guys thank you so much for the help. Greatly appreciated advice you guys are giving me. 10 thumbs up. !!
 
The programs you guys are referencing me to. Are these online based saving programs. Would I be saving all my data to a database on the internet for back up purposes? Is this how it works?
 
Also, How exactly do I transfer my cakewalk data over to the new hard drive. Ive read that with the second hard drive you don't have to install any operating system. So do I go to my saves cakewalk project folder and just click and drop the saved recordings over to the new hard drive. I guess what im asking is, what particular steps do I take in order to transfer the already existing projects to the new drive. Im sure this is a newb question, ha... but since I dont really know and wouldn't want to have a mishap, I figure I would ask. 
 
Awesome shout out to.....
 
Skook
Steve_karl
Lawajava
 
thanks guys!

No the back up software is local. It can be automated to back up only what data has changed so it makes life easier. And the one I mentioned is free as well. The company makes some very useful software. 
 
 http://www.easeus.com/backup-software/tb-free.html
 
When you build the new computer, drag and drop your Sonar Project folder to your chosen data drive.  
 Once you have Sonar installed on C drive Open preferences / storage and set the file paths to the folders location. While your in there you can change the pathway for any storage. 
Make sure and use "per Project folders" to keep thing tidy.