In my recent build I have opted for a 120Gb Samsung SSD as my C: drive for the OS & Programs, and as a second drive for everything else, a 1Tb Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 64MB Cache SATA3 Hard Drive.
My only concern is that some people say the SSD's wear out after a while, but that may be heresay.

CakeAlexS


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.

Fragmentation on a modern file system like the ones used by Vista, Windows 7 and 8 are not as much of a concern as they once were. On SSDs you never want to defragment it.  


I have 6 HDs not counting another removable one for Vista. 

It really doesn't matter how you set up, in that why you have them, or what they are used for. It, however, is better to have more than one.

> Fragmentation on a modern file system like the ones used by Vista, Windows 7 and 8 are not as much of a concern as they once were.
 
That is the Microsoft line, they are assuming you are defragging automatically once a month and there is code to optimize the position of some software such as the bootloader and all the software that went with it (that's why XP booted so much faster than Windows 2000). Note this is from a company who said that fragmentation didn't exist at all with NTFS (with NT 3.5), only with FAT (even though there were third party apps out at the time that would defrag NTFS). Including a defragger in the next release soon killed that line. Nope file systems still do get fragmented, yes not as much as FAT but enough to be a concern esp with DAW applications in my view.
 
NB there are no moving parts in a SD card, so sure, for this fragmentation is not an issue.

That was not an MS line I wrote that was my line. If they agree so much the better. LOL

@LordElpus... I avoided SSDs for the reported failure problems (and cost) but the newer ones are supposedly becoming more reliable. I'd make sure you do regular back ups though anyway just in case. I find it's easy to get swayed by outdated information when researching stuff online. For example there were a TON of complaints about the interface I bought and bad drivers which kind of turned me off. After digging around and checking dates on posts/articles though I found out that all those problems had been solved and I couldn't be happier with it. Basically keep in mind that in the computer world things move ridiculously fast sometimes so it's best to check dates on everything you read. If you see a bunch of complaints but they are tagged 6-12 months ago and everything since then is touting how great the thing is something may have been updated/changed/etc...

In fact another perfect example is Sonar X1. I read an ENORMOUS amount of complaints mostly coming from this forum but after digging in a little further I realized the bulk of those were coming from the X1c days and earlier. X1d comments were mostly very good... even if there were far less of them and that was because people tend not to take to the internet to freak out so much when things are going smoothly.

Trying to deal with modern tech is very interesting beyond just the hardware/bits/bytes/drivers/software/whatever... there is a very human element that comes into play. After all... humans are the ones using all this crap and we are certainly odd beasts.

;-)