Hi all, <br><br>
 
I think I'm making some progress, my Pod 2.0 seems to be working well for me, as is Sonar, now if I just had some creative ability... <br><br>
 
That aside, I was thinking I might make my Sonar experience a bit smoother, by arranging the various folders differently. <br><br>
 
 
I've got 2 hard drives fitted, each with around 4 partitions. The primary drive is 250 GB, the secondary 512 GB. Currently, I think, all my Sonar installation is on C:<br><br>
 
 
I only have one pc, and also use it for games, video, newsgroups, forums etc - so I appreciate I'm not going to have something ideal for Sonar, but would it, for instance, make sense putting the instruments and songs on a different drive/partition? I appreciate your thoughts.
 
 
 
 
 
 

There is no real performance advantage to multiple partitions. With two drives put the SONAR application on the OS partition (the default location) and the SONAR projects on the second physical drive, using per-project folders for each project. If the OS partition is too full, you could install (or move at a later date) the samples for the synths to another location. The installers will give you options to install the samples elsewhere or read http://forum.cakewalk.com/fb.ashx?m=2673527 to do it after installation.

Not only is there no performance advantage to partitioned drives, there is actually a small performance penalty. Consider adding a third drive for your audio, leaving it as one large partition. Get a 1TB drive and you can also install your games and videos on it.

I install OS and SONAR on C drive, all projects on D drive and all plugings, additional content, wavs for samples (eg drums and dimension pro..) and anything else on E drive. The important bit is to have the audio on a separate drive from C, but you can take it further by putting additional content on a third drive for the best chance of high performance.

With the price of storage space these days, I don't see many reasons for anyone to ever use partitions.

For more info on drive configurations, check out the Scott's Notes section of issue 44 of the DigiFreq music recording newsletter...
http://www.digifreq.com/digifreq/issue.asp?ID=44

Sign up for free future issues here... http://www.digifreq.com/digifreq/subscribe.asp

Scott

--
Scott R. Garrigus - http://garrigus.com - SONAR X2 Power! - http://garrigus.com/?SonarX2Power
* Author of the Cakewalk Sonar and Sony Sound Forge Power book series: http://garrigus.com/?PowerBooks
* Author of the Cakewalk Sonar ProAudioTutor video tutorial series: http://garrigus.com/?ProAudioTutor
* Publisher of the DigiFreq free music technology newsletter: http://digifreq.com/?DigiFreq
* Publisher of the NewTechReview free consumer technology newsletter: http://newtechreview.com/?NewTechReview

having your os, sonar, vst plugins, project files all on the same partition is a chore.
but heres the thing, ive never run sonar on a 1tb drive.
ive never run it on anything larger than a 500gb HD.
ive got 3 drives in my main daw.

everything is kept on the 500.: my os , sonar ,project files, plug ins, sample librarys.
only storage for the other drives.
if I need a large library, ill remove another one first.

hard drives these days are becoming better but it all depends on where this computer came from and are they stock drives or added in after.
I think we take for granted the meaning of recall to often. and to ask your drive to recall your os, plug ins, sonar, picture cache, samples, bla ,bla,bla. is a lot of work for your ram and drive both.
larger drives have  more platters. your HD working overtime to recall data from different points of your drive is madness.

I know I will here those who don't see it that way, but im going by research, research ive learned and experienced.
ive done a lot of drive testing in my time.
there are just so many elements that come in to play, platers, newer drive, older driver ? ..speed..cache..
I keep it small if possible.

That's another great reason to go with an SSD for as much as you can afford.

Even apart from mechanical issues, loading samples and such is just so much faster (10 times maybe ?) that not having an SSD is painful. 150$ buys a top of the line 120 gb SSD that will hold all the OS, all of the DAW and other programs, and a large chunk of samples.

For various reasons, I like to keep my Sonar Project files (by that I mean the project CWP and the audio WAV files) on a separate hard drive that is dedicated to my musical and video creations.  If I had a single hard drive, then my preference would be to have a separate partition for this purpose.

Similarly I always like to keep my OS and Programs/Software on its own drive too, typically the 'C' drive (usually because there are some programs, typically legacy stuff, that seem to make a false assumption that the OS drive and the C drive are one and the same).

There are performance reasons for having a separate and large hard drive for your project audio data, and it's worth considering if you are able to.  And there are other considerations, such as ease-of-backups, file-copy-speed, your own logical organizational preferences, running defrag utilities, file search, etc. that may help you to work more efficiently but sometimes at the expense of that performance.

Some things to consider:
- if you like to reinstall your OS and programs often, then it can be a nuisance to have personal data on the same partition 
- if you like to move your audio files around, for example a rendered master file, from your audio drive into your video software (or vice versa), then you may want to colocate the data for audio and video on the same partition, because a move across partitions (or worse yet, across physical drives) can be slower (in orders of magnitude)
- you may be able to easily influence or alter the size of data read by the hard drive to something much larger, which improves performance at the expense of wasted disk space for smaller files (by reading more data less often)
- if your hard drive were to crash, how would you wish your data was organized and backed up so that you could more easily recover what you had
- a lot of hard drive performance tips seem to be much less relevant these days

There is no one right answer, but my suggestion for you would be to use your 512GB hard drive for the Sonar project files and audio, using its "store audio per project" option (whatever it is that it's called).

HTH

chuckebaby


having your os, sonar, vst plugins, project files all on the same partition is a chore.
but heres the thing, ive never run sonar on a 1tb drive.
ive never run it on anything larger than a 500gb HD.
ive got 3 drives in my main daw.

everything is kept on the 500.: my os , sonar ,project files, plug ins, sample librarys.
only storage for the other drives.
if I need a large library, ill remove another one first.

hard drives these days are becoming better but it all depends on where this computer came from and are they stock drives or added in after.
I think we take for granted the meaning of recall to often. and to ask your drive to recall your os, plug ins, sonar, picture cache, samples, bla ,bla,bla. is a lot of work for your ram and drive both.
larger drives have  more platters. your HD working overtime to recall data from different points of your drive is madness.

I know I will here those who don't see it that way, but im going by research, research ive learned and experienced.
ive done a lot of drive testing in my time.
there are just so many elements that come in to play, platers, newer drive, older driver ? ..speed..cache..
I keep it small if possible.

FWIW: Having designed power electronics for disk drives for 18 yrs (Spindle Motor Drivers and Voice Coil Actuators Power I.C.s) for Seagate, Maxtor, Digital, Quantum, and WD, with all things being equal, i.e. Spindle Speed, Seek times, etc. a larger capacity drive (or higher data density) will be faster since (assuming sequential data), there will be less switching to different platters when reading/writing. The latency introduced by the moving voice coil read/write head is perhaps the most significant source of delays in the read/write process. This becomes even more of an issue with the smaller drives since it will fill up faster and require the drive to look for empty spots to "park" the data.
 
Walt

  Guys, thanks very much for all the thoughts and advice.

I think I will try putting some of the folders on the other drive. I don't want to fiddle around with the registry and so on, so I suppose this means re-installing.

Is Sonar one of those programs that only lets you install it a few times?

Will it recognise what I'm trying to do and help me re-organise the existing installation or is it a full uninstall followed by a re-install?

I don't want much, do I? ;)