Should I partition my drive and put my instruments samples and projects on a different partition than the OS?

I normally do *BUT* depends on your drive size AND remember some things like installing to C drive (some Dim Pro things for example) , so leave plenty of space on it.

any data on my D drives needs saving.. the C drive is apps and stuff I can reinstall.. it's also handy if you use cloning software and need to do a restore

On a single drive system there is no appreciable performance gain from splitting things into multiple partitions.  The hard drive has to seek and transfer data and can only do that from one place at a time on a single disk, whether in one partition or 2 or 10 or whatever.  Takes the same time.

So, the choice is completely about personal content management choice for your computer.  Some folks like to split programs and data into multiple partitions.  Some like to not worry about it and just keep it all together.  Some like disco music and can't be helped.

It's really a matter of how you want to work with placement and such.  In my opinion, wherever you have things stored really will end up being a non-issue, because Sonar uses a set of folder locations in Preferences, so that you don't really have to keep looking for things - they will be stored and retrieved from whatever folder location is specified for that component of Cakewalk-managed data and programs.

I hope that makes sense.  Should you decide to try moving things around, you can do so and simply change the folder location within Cakewalk Preferences and all will be well - I just don't see much point of that exercise on a single-drive system.

Bob Bone

it's also handy if you use cloning software and need to do a restore 

+1 to this last line. It is exactly what I do (in my case using Acronis). It gives one the luxury of re-installing a clean "un-surfed" C drive in about 16 minutes - reboot and off we go again :)

Thanks.  I appreciate the feedback.