If I bought a solid state drive, how would it best be used for Sonar? As the boot drive with Sonar installed there, samples on another drive?
Thanks - rev

Depends, really, on how you use your DAW.  Do you use many samples, VST synths.  Do your VST synths (if used) stream sample as they are played or they load in do memory in their entirety.  Also depends on what size SSD you plan on purchasing. Do you do MIDI editing or prominently audio editing?

If you can, purchase two SSDs. OS and programs on one, samples on the other.  Have a small 250 gig for the OS and a larger one for the sample data and documents and projects.  You might want to grab an external USB drive for your backups and image files.  At least create a daily image of your OS drive. 

Others may have other solutions.

If you can afford it, two SSDs as suggested above.
 
When I bought my computer, I ordered it with an SSD and two conventional drives. The plan was to use the SSD for samples. But when the computer arrived, they'd configured the SSD as the C: drive, so the first thing I did was move the O/S to one of the conventional drives. Well, I was so dismayed by the slower boot times that I put the SSD back as the boot disk and decided to get a second SSD for samples.
 
My computer boots up in less than 10 seconds. (That's not entirely due to the SSD; I also have fast boot enabled.) That's such a great convenience! SONAR is on the SSD, so it comes up in < 5 seconds.
 
Unfortunately, I've not been able to afford that second SSD for the samples. But dammit, it's gonna be my XMas gift to myself even if its means nothing for the grandchildren. Big Kontakt projects can take over to 2 minutes to load. Funny, that would have been a dream 5 years ago but today it's unacceptable. Half the time I log on here it's because I'm waiting for a project to load.

I agree with bitflipper that the speed and convenience of having your OS on an SSD is great.  Once you try it, you will have a very hard time going back to a conventional boot drive again.  I also use another SSD for SONAR and my audio files, and a third for samples. But truthfully, I don't notice any real difference with those two drives. Of course, conventional hard drives are fully capable of very high speeds, track counts and sample streaming these days.  I'm probably just not throwing enough at the audio and samples SSD's to really see a difference. 
 
Nevertheless, as promidi said above, everything depends on your work style.  If you are finding bottlenecks streaming samples or playing back your 297 audio tracks, an SSD or two might be just what you need.  But I say first get a cheap 256 Gb SSD for your boot drive - you won't be sorry.

SSDs work until they don't.  Because of limited (which improves with each gen) write cycles you want to avoid filling them.  Why? Because they do wear leveling.  So imagine if you run them close to full, they will be thrashing fewer cells more often and wearing them out sooner.  The higher capacity ones can store multiple values in a cell which means less potential for measuring the different values over time as the full capacitive charge degrades.  So, do your homework to be sure you get ones that are better quality and for critical work you may want to get single level cell rather than multiple.  No question the speed improvements are huge and worth it.  Just be aware of how you use them.  Generally not a good idea to run a defragment on them.  

If you will buy only one SSD, then both - as a booth drive (and Sonar) and most used sample libraries, depending on the space left...

I recently purchased two SSD Drives - one for system drive and one for my work / project drive - it is the BEST thing I think I have ever done re improving the overall performance of my system - and basically has saved me buying a new system - my current set up is about a 4 year old i7 16Gb ram, 64 bit and it was really starting to creak!! Now no problems at all.
Nigel
 
 

Keith Albright [Cakewalk]
SSDs work until they don't.  Because of limited (which improves with each gen) write cycles you want to avoid filling them.  Why? Because they do wear leveling.  So imagine if you run them close to full, they will be thrashing fewer cells more often and wearing them out sooner.  The higher capacity ones can store multiple values in a cell which means less potential for measuring the different values over time as the full capacitive charge degrades.  So, do your homework to be sure you get ones that are better quality and for critical work you may want to get single level cell rather than multiple.  No question the speed improvements are huge and worth it.  Just be aware of how you use them.  Generally not a good idea to run a defragment on them.  

 
Thanks for this Keith. This nails what I was suspecting was why Sonar was crashing. I had not checked my ( C drive  120GB ) disk usage and found I was over 80%. A little bit of housekeeping and no crashes since. I really need to swap it out for a bigger SSD and soon. 
I also use one for my working CWP files and it's also only a 120GB but not a problem at this point. 
All my samples are on a 7200 2 TB drive where everything is also backed up. 

Keith Albright [Cakewalk]
SSDs work until they don't.  Because of limited (which improves with each gen) write cycles you want to avoid filling them.  Why? Because they do wear leveling.  So imagine if you run them close to full, they will be thrashing fewer cells more often and wearing them out sooner.  The higher capacity ones can store multiple values in a cell which means less potential for measuring the different values over time as the full capacitive charge degrades.  So, do your homework to be sure you get ones that are better quality and for critical work you may want to get single level cell rather than multiple.  No question the speed improvements are huge and worth it.  Just be aware of how you use them.  Generally not a good idea to run a defragment on them.  

Whilst this is somewhat true, the Samsung Pro Evo range guarantees the drive against failure and slowing down through use for some insane amount of writing/gigabytes. My point being...some drives are more equal than others. 
 
To answer the OP question...I use an SSD drive as my boot drive, and I also have a portable USB drive connected to a USB 3 port as my audio/video drive. All my virtual instrument samples are on my boot drive (Notion by Presonus, Grand Rhapsody by Waves 14gig :), Dim Pro and a couple of others) - it isn't huge only 256 gigs, but it seems to be enough. I still have over 80 gigs free. I'm lucky because my ACER Nitro laptop also has an internal spindle drive for storage. 
 
To gauge how useful an SSD drive is for audio. My last composition https://soundcloud.com/aaudiomystiks/sonata-no7-organik-mirrorball-blues had 60 tracks of 64bitfp 48khz audio, and I was only just starting to max out my system...it probably had some headroom, but I think I'd reached the threshold of throughput, probably not ram (32 gig) or CPU. I suspect if I had a thunderbolt portable drive or an internal SSD drive my track count could have been higher. When I was trying to mix a track a few weeks ago on my old laptop...I could barely get past 20 tracks of 64bitfp 44.1khz audio, let alone 60. I certainly could not mix and master at within the same project, like I did on the above link, which is what I like to do.  
 
Hopefuly that answers the OP question.
 
Ben

Keith Albright [Cakewalk]
SSDs work until they don't...limited..write cycles...

 
I was considering this issue when I was building my new PC. I had a old spare 120GB SSD lying around and I ended up using it for storing ephemeral stuff, such as:

• Sonar's picture cache
• Browser's temporary internet files
• Windows Pagefile
• Caches & temp folders for any programs that allow the user to specify filepaths for such use

Files included here tend to get written to disk, then deleted and replaced often. Having them on a less important drive saves wear and tear on the main system drive. And if this drive wears out before all the others, it won't cause any serious disruption.

By the way, I am not suggesting that this is a good use for a second drive. Maybe a 5th or 6th.