Even when I have a very small project (half a dozen tracks), as I simply drag along a clip to select it (and even not while playing), I have *hugely* busy disk access occurring in sync with my dragging.  The instant I stop dragging, the disk access stops. Start dragging, and the huge disk access occurs.
 
I have 3 hard disks in my i7, 8GB RAM system.  All drives have many gigs of free space.  Defragged, etc.  I have Sonar X2 configured to use the second hard drive for picture data, the third hard drive for audio data.
 
Is there a guide anywhere as to how drives should be configured?  When I go to disk management, Disk 0, the System drive C: shows: Boot, Pagefile, Crash Dump, Primary Partition.  Disk 1 (F:) shows: Active, Primary Partition.  Disk 2, E:, shows: Primary Partition.
 
The strange bit is that my disk 1 is showing as "Active" instead of disk 0 (I think my disk 1 came from my old computer). The computer boots fine. 
 
Anyway my main concern is the huge disk access as I drag across clips.  Often, during recordings, the recording will stop and the transport will show "dropout".
 
I'm using a Focusrite Pro40 through the motherboard's firewire interface.
 
Thanks for any help.
Dave

it might be worth trying a test and putting your projects on your main os ,the one with sonar on it.
also make sure your disk settings are set to not allow the extra HD's to go in to sleep mode.
 
I know everyone is different but I mainly keep my projects, cache,plugins,sonar on my main os with sonar.
haven't had any issues.

How are you measuring the disk access? Even if it is just a lot of head thrashing during a drag and drop, it suggests that you may be writing to the page file (virtual memory) during the operation, and that in turn suggests that there may not be sufficient free RAM to do the operation in memory. I would expect that Sonar does not write every move to disk as it is being done, but that is another possibility. And I guess if you set an autosave to a very short period, or after a very few changes, or if the drag and drop is being interpreted as gazillions of changes, then it would have to write the autosave file to disk shortly after the file changes.
You can check memory use in task manager, and you could try turning off autosave if it is running to see if that makes any difference.

This because when you drag and drop an audio clip, there is processing that comes from this. It also has to do with the type of hard drive you are using and the speed of it. You also need to have a separate hard drive for audio only (CWP and per project files). your C drive should contain only the programs and no audio.
 
It also could be the type of MOBO your using and the BIOS. There are many factors that go into a great DAW
 
Cj

Thanks Charlie.  I think I've now discovered the issue.  When you bring up a blank project and don't use a filename, Sonar copies audio from my global audio folder on Drive to the audio folder on Drive F to my C:\Cakewalk Projects\Audio folder.  Once it's saved the first time, the disk access issue stops.  It's strange though, why such disk access on the global audio folder, as if there's zero buffering.  Although I have per project audio folders selected in Preferences, it appears that only works if you name the project right at the start (File, New...), something I didn't realize.
 
In multi-hard-disk systems, is there an opinion that the putting the 'Cakewalk Projects' folder on a data drive is better than having it on the system drive?
 
Dave

With three drives, I use one for the OS and Apps (like SONAR), one for audio projects, including the Global audio folder and one for samples.

Thanks all. As far as the robustness of my DAW, it was a situation where the disk was thrashing without moving the clips; simply dragging to select would do it.  I'm using an Intel i7 on an ASUS P8P67-LE with 8 GB RAM.  I can reproduce the problem with a single 4 measure track.  Once the audio is copied to the Cakewalk Projects\Audio folder, all is fine, suggesting something strange with the global audio drive.
 
The drive with all the thrashing while selecting clips is a 250 GB Western Digital WD2500JD-00HBB0.  Pretty old - perhaps it can't handle it.  My system drive (where my project audio currently is) is a Western Digital Caviar Black 500 GB.  That's probably why my problems stop when I move the data there! :-)
 
Dave