I know there are countless ways to get good results...however, I am building my DAW PC and would appreciate some confirmation that what I have planned for my HD configuration is correct. I plan to do this....

C: (80 GB SSD) Windows 8 OS
D: (256 GB SSD) Sonar X3 Pro, BFD 3, Amplitube 3, VST dll's
E: (500 GB SSD) Audio Content/ Sample Libraries / Loops
F: (1 TB HD) Music Projects / Sessions and Audio Data

Does anyone here have this type of setup for Sonar? Is this the best way to do it? PLEASE....I really would appreciate your input.

I have a 240GB SSD as my O/S drive and 6 TB of magnetic media. The multiple SSD's are overkill in my opinion (I have 67GB free on my SSD and have all programs installed on it). The magnetic media is for project file storage and backups. The only recommendation to magnetic HDD's is get one with a 7200rpm spindle speed minimum.
 
If you want to have both Win7 and Win8 available, you would still only need 2 SSD's for this.
 
Edit: I just searched your motherboard (http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P6T_Deluxe_V2/#specifications ), and it looks like this has SATA II ports on it (3Gb/s)? Is this true? If so, the "speed boost" you get from an SSD will not be as fast as you are expecting. Just a heads up. SATA III (6Gb/s) is the fastest link from an SSD to your motherboard.
 

The standard most commonly seen is:

C: drive OS, programs and plugins, SSD
D: drive, projects SATA 3
E: drive, samples and such SATA 3. The issue with drives D and E, is that projects and samples tend to grow quickly.

I have nearly 2TB of sample data and as much as I'd love to have it all on SSD, it's just not financially viable at this time.

With projects of course you can do quite a few projects on SSD before removing finished ones to an archiving drive (any speed) to free up your SSD drive.

Make sure the motherboard you are buying supports 6gbps and has more than 2 ports....If you are going SSD to get the speed out of all of them, you should buy the fastest...and put them on the fastest ports.
 
Just a observation.
 
Maximus VI has 10 x sata 6gbps ports.
 
 

mettelus
I just searched your motherboard (http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P6T_Deluxe_V2/#specifications ), and it looks like this has SATA II ports on it (3Gb/s)? Is this true? If so, the "speed boost" you get from an SSD will not be as fast as you are expecting. Just a heads up. SATA III (6Gb/s) is the fastest link from an SSD to your motherboard. 

Hey mettelus. Thanks for pointing that out. I hadn't given that a thought. I actually built this system two years ago and now am thinking of redoing the hard drives. But this changes things with only the SATA II. Perhaps I'll wait on this upgrade until I actually need to and can afford to do it right. Thanks again.

mudgel
The standard most commonly seen is:

C: drive OS, programs and plugins, SSD
D: drive, projects SATA 3
E: drive, samples and such SATA 3.

Hi mudgel. I actually saw this configuration quite a bit in researching it online, but I also had read in a few places that it's best to keep the OS installed on its own drive. Is that correct at all?? Also, could you please tell me the sizes of the drives you have listed? Thanks so much for your help.

My system is pretty archaic these days but was still benchmarking #10 in July of this year (at 2 years old). The bare bones of this machine is just getting cheaper and cheaper. There was a thread posted in the X1 days you may want to check out. http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/2733572
 
If you consider this, be SURE to get the K CPU's, not the "default" 2600 that comes up!

Mojo3432
 I actually saw this configuration quite a bit in researching it online, but I also had read in a few places that it's best to keep the OS installed on its own drive. Is that correct at all?? Also, could you please tell me the sizes of the drives you have listed? Thanks so much for your help.

No to the OS on "its own drive"... an SSD is like a massive chunk of RAM, and therefore ~300 times faster than a magnetic HDD... it will send data to the CPU as fast as it can handle it, pretty much. Just be sure to research them! You should not defrag them and there are a few other nuances to using them. The cells in them will decay over time, so some features of Windows need to be disabled.
 
For me, I partitioned my E and F... which are physically the same drive, but I have all SONAR data on the F drive only. Spindle speed is important for data rate, as is the SATA III mentioned above.

Keeping the OS, programs and plugins on the main hard drive and making that an SSD allows those data intensive aspects to load and run faster. I chose this method from my own research and advice, and my experience has proven it to be true.

Projects on a separate drive increase data throughput as there is now another drive (with read heads) to load up data.

Samples are often streamed from disc and even though it would be nice to have them all on SSD, it seems a little costly at the moment for the terabyte size that sample collections can soon reach. SATA 3 is fast enough to stream samples, go to 10krpm disc speed if you have concerns.

OS disc 250 to 500 gig. I have 250 SSD on my Studio PC while I have 500 HDD 3 on my laptop where I have all sorts of programs imaginable from Office to Adobe suites and assorted other Daw, Video editors and plugins for video and audio work with only about 65% space used.
Project disc 250 gig. SSD or HDD Additional projects can easily be archived to other discs.

Samples 2TB or larger minimum 7200rpm rotational speed.

Something common to all disc is that they should run on SATA 3 ports that is 6GB. HDD should be 7200 rpm.
A limitation you may come across is how many SATA 3 ports your motherboard has. Mine only has 4. Of course if your motherboard doesn't have SATA3 ports you'll have to be content with SATA 2.

Have a good back up strategy, some folks use RAID set ups but I haven't seen anything to convince me that it is of particular benefit to audio.