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.

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.

> 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
 
Indeed, separate the OS from the applications! Dual boot! Put all your DAW stuff on one OS and all your other apps like Word/Excel/GTA on the other. Or do what I do (which is a bit mad) and have four OS's to boot from.

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.

jeebustrain
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.
 

A few years ago the question was always should I use RAID 0 to improve "performance." The answer then was NO. It was a waste of money for a DAW, and increased the risk of failure. Now it is SSD, which should give a faster throughput, but again what is the point? You may save a minute or two waiting for your OS to boot, but once it is loaded, an SSD will not materially affect performance with Sonar. If you can't afford Sonar producer, why would you spend money on an SSD?
 
If you think you can feel that the OS is "snappier" with an SSD then clearly and SSD is worth the extra money to you. I assume you drive a Jaguar to work as well.

+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.

 

Bristol: FWIW, I was only saying that separating OS and Apps is unnecessary.  Keeping DATA (whether sample sets, projects, docs, or VSTs) on a separate drive is definitely recommended.
 
CakeAlexS - Sure, if you want to separate everything, go for it.  My point was that if you split them by partition it does no good.  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.
 
The original question was about config of a music system and my advice is to keep OS and apps on the same drive, data on a separate drive.  Separated partitions are useful for organization, but not for performance.

>  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.

The problem I have with multiple drives is location issues. Computers will only search where you tell them to. If they can't find something then you're sol, then you gotta play computer tech and screw around trying to find your stuff.  I've had multiple drives and found them to be nothing but headaches.
 
I also got burned on a ssd that only lasted a month, so I've now gone to a sata Western Digital Blue 1TB drive...that seems to be plenty for me and I don't have any location issues between the many programs and plug-ins I have installed. Everything is running just fine off the one drive.

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.