Thread Optimal Hard Drive Setup for DAW

Well I would say place them in the default location on your internal drive where Sonar is. if I got your q right, you understand the importance of multiple drives. The most important aspect of multi drives is placing your apps, (DAW,plugins,samples) on one drive as they are sources which are accessed and loaded. Your internal or main drive should store these. Now, depending on the music you do or are trying to do would decide the need for more drives. If you are an electronic maniac and eat, live, breath and shit samples and have a desire to posses every sound that was ever created then having a dedicated drive for them would be warranted. Just because we are talking massive Gb's. (I didn't know that samples were streamed, I thought they were loaded into a sampler)But if as you say they are streamed, it would make sense that they be on a path of their own. Otherwise they could be on your internal drive with other applications. Once again if you are an electronica freak then you will be amassing some samples.

Ok, if you record more audio in real-time such as drums, guits and such you will want an external or additional drive just to write this recorded data to. As you know data recordings at 24-96 bits take some disk space. And a dedicated path for the recording of audio data does head off a traffic jam caused by reading and writing simultaneously to a single HD.

Last, if you have an extra HD because you realized it was not needed because you have not got that far with your recordings and sample collections yet then use it to back up those precious gems you have recorded.

I understand this is late... but if someone needs it.

Do not compress your files, ever. If you did, back up, reformat, and reinstall.

Do not have your drive's contents indexed during idle time.

Turn all all unnecessary sharing to the files, folders, ddrives, volumes, system. Turn of "previous versions" and have another program do your backup routine (but get it done!)

On Windows, turn off all your services you don't use, uninstall everything you don't need, keep all your drivers up to date. Don't bother with a pre-caching software, WinNT kernels do fine on their own.

But all your apps and heavily trafficked data on a SYSTEM or BOOT driver, and then a DATA driver, should better yet, be a whole other physical volume