I just did a search on the model number for the 160GB drive. It seems to be saying it is 10 000 RPMs. If that is true using that as your OS/Sonar drive, the 1TB as your audio and samples drive would probably be the best way to go and use the Green for backup and bulk storage. I use two drives in this style config and it's fine.

No, its not a good idea to partition a drive anymore. In the past it was done for access reasons. OSs had trouble accessing very large drives. Today that is no longer a problem. The only reason to partition now is for dual booting. 

 

I use two drives in this style config and it's fine.

 
If the samples are being loaded/streamed from RAM, the two drive approach won't affect performance.
If you trying to pull 128 notes of disk-streaming polyphony... AND... run 64 channels of audio, that's when you want a dedicated 3rd HD for disk-streaming sample libraries.  That's too much load for a single conventional HD.

@Jim... Good to know. It's unlikely I'll ever be doing anything that crazy but you never know.

To the OP... BTW up until recently I didn't realize that when I was doing Save As on my projects that Sonar was defaulting back to writing audio to my C drive even though I set up the projects initially to write to the E drive (my second drive... D is my CD/DVD burner). In fact I recall when I was talking to Cakewalk tech about setting things up they said with my specs that I didn't even need to worry about having the second drive to write audio to. I asked them if a partition on the C drive would make that type of set up work better and they gave me a resounding, forceful NO.

Not sure why Alex brought that up but there ya have it.

Oh and I have 16GB of DDR3 so that helps. Apparently I could expand the system to have 32GB if I wanted. That would be SICK! lol

;-)

Another good reason to put your projects on another HD is when you change your OS. In fact its a good idea to place all data on another HD. It wouldn't hurt to have a couple HDs for just backups too. That can be a simple copy type backup. 

At some point I have to figure out why my E drive keeps falling asleep on me. I thought I had disable all the power management stuff but the darn thing decides to take a nap if I don't manipulate the audio for a while. Makes it take a few seconds to start playback  and sometimes causing the audio engine to stop if I make an action too quickly after it wakes up.

Once I get a good back up drive I'm going to image the system as well as make  regular back up of all my project files then completely wipe the system and start from scratch. Hopefully I'll be able to afford a bare drive to toss in my cage in the next couple months.

I got pretty confused :P I think it's reasonable to put audio files(and samples) in a different drive than the OS because the OS is accessing the drive it's on, and the DAW will access the audio files/samples in the same time... it can't all be done simultaneously.

To be honest with a modern computer and a fastish hard drive you can run the whole lot on a single partition/single fast hard drive without much issue. However having partitions reduces fragmentation of key files, and makes your backup strategy easier, plus it can speed up access, that is specifically in a single hard drive scenario. Looking at the speed and size of the other hard drives I would still recommend using the primary hard drive only for day to day work. Yes another faster hard drive to store data would be a better idea. A third hard drive somewhat overboard but you can never have enough hard drives. Personally I use four, but I actually only use two. I mirror my hard drives.

Beepster


I just did a search on the model number for the 160GB drive. It seems to be saying it is 10 000 RPMs. If that is true using that as your OS/Sonar drive, the 1TB as your audio and samples drive would probably be the best way to go and use the Green for backup and bulk storage. I use two drives in this style config and it's fine.

I totally agree with this ^^^