I am about to take the plunge into SSD. I have always used a dedicated HD for my Sonar Audio files. I am thinking with the speed of SSD, it should not be necessary to have 2 separate drives for the OS and wave files. Is there any disadvantage from a performance perspective, of using a single 256 GB drive with 2 partitions, one for OS and the other for audio? I hate to waist an SSD controller on a wave only drive, and space has never been an issue for my audio drive since I am lazy procrastinator.  Thanks in advance.

I've got two SSDs in my lappy and, so far, so good. There will be many here that will advise against a single drive, but, at the end of the day, the decision is yours.

My two SSD setup is pretty damned fast, at boot up and when reading wave files in Sonar. I've never pushed the disk activity beyond 5% with my smaller ten audio track projects. 

Oh, and anyway, if you think it isn't performing as it should, you can always get another SSD or HDD

I am interested in other people's experiences.  I have a fairly  large spinning drive divided into C and D for OS and Audio.  I plan to add an SSD just for sample libraries: Hollywood strings specifically.  Any feedback or tips would be good.  (BTW, I have a rack-mounted PC, not a laptop.)

I have been told this is a no-brainer, but I have heard that many times and ended up down for days.

I picked up a cheap 64GB SSD drive for audio only and use a bigger one for my OS.
 
If that doesn't appeal, then partitioning a 256GB SSD is still going to be *way* faster than a normal HD. Just remember that SSD partitions have to have 1MB (not more not less) free space before the partition. I'd never heard of this - but at best, you get worse performance, and at worst (like with my old Asus motherboard) the drives aren't even recognised. I couldn't even boot from my "good" drive because the BIOS just hung when querying the (wrongly partitioned) SSDs.
 
Here's some links - or just google "SSD partition"
 
http://www.howtogeek.com/97242/how-to-migrate-windows-7-to-a-solid-state-drive/
 
http://thessdreview.com/ssd-guides/optimization-guides/the-ssd-optimization-guide-2/  
  
http://lifehacker.com/5837769/make-sure-your-partitions-are-correctly-aligned-for-optimal-solid-state-drive-performance
 
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/113967-ssd-alignment.html
http://www.overclock.net/t/1226963/how-to-properly-re-align-your-ssd-hdd-partitions
  

Thanks for all the replies. I plan on using about 3 or 4 SSD drives on this system. I want to use SSD for the OS, audio, OS X Lion(Hackintosh build with bootcamp), and samples. Thinking I can consolidate the OS and audio drives into 2 partitions on one drive.  

Not sure about the need to partition.  Not good to partition regular disks cuz the same heads must move more,...

The comp builders use SSDs for audio and for samples that must stream.  Not much benefit for OS after the computer has booted and configured.

Read a bit about how smaller disks are better for audio recording.  So thinking about getting a small SSD to use for active projects.

I don't use any streaming samplers.

I'm still under the impression that SSDs are less reliable than HDDs, and that when they fail they completely fail. They are best for applications where there are more reads than writes (writing reduces lifespan). I don't proclaim to be an expert, but did a bit of research after a customer started demanding SSD solutions because "they are more reliable because there are no moving parts". Uh, yeah, I have two of my grandfather's working pocket watches and a landfill full of digital watches that says that's wrong-headed thinking. (Once they realized how expensive network grade SSDs are they decided HDDs weren't so bad.)

jm24


Read a bit about how smaller disks are better for audio recording.  So thinking about getting a small SSD to use for active projects.

Don't know about smaller drives being better for audio recording, but what I do know is that on regular drives, access times are the fastest on the outside of the disk, then reduce steadily as you approach the inner. Therefore it makes sense to have your audio partition on the outside (typically, the left side when you're setting up your partitions in the partition diagram). It probably makes sense to stream samples from the outside as well. 

partitioning is not good for most uses

jm24


partitioning is not good for most uses

Yes, if you're talking about partitioning for audio and samples together for example, but there is nothing wrong with partitioning a music drive and using one of the partitions for archives and backups. It's best to place an archive partition on the inside of the disk, where spin speeds are slower.