All good advice, except I do take issue with one suggestion: Put all your projects and sound lib on an external USB3 drive.
If you have room in your computer’s case, internal SATA drives have have a speed advantage over any external drives other than eSATA or Thunderbolt, but 7200 RPM is the minimum acceptable speed for spinning drives and you should not use “green” drives. If you can afford SSD’s, they’re even faster…Samsung 840 Pro or Evo are getting a lot of love on other audio forums.
The preferred drive configuration for audio uses a minimum of three drives…one for the OS and programs, one for projects and recording audio ONLY, and one or more for samples.
If you only have two drives, use one for the OS, programs, and samples…the other should be used for projects and recording audio ONLY.
If you only have one drive, do not expect even good performance for small projects, and you can totally forget about large projects.
If you absolutely have to use external drives, USB3 will be okay for small to mid-sized projects, but make sure they are 7200 RPM non-“green” drives.
Rounding up the basic concepts…
For optimal performance you need at least three drives…one for the OS and programs, one for projects and recording audio ONLY, and one or more for samples.
If you aren’t using a lot of VI’s you can get by with two drives…use one for the OS, programs, and samples…the other projects and recording audio ONLY.
With only one drive, you can do things like using a guitar and voice to lay down ideas, but I wouldn’t recommend using it for much more than that.
SSD’s will give the best performance.
For spinning drives, 7200 RPM is the minimum speed you should use.
“Green” drives are a total no-no…they’re “green” because they shut down if they aren’t used for some period of time, and I’m pretty sure they have a little guy in them that shuts them down right before you press “record”.
Drives are dirt cheap these days, so don’t skimp if at all possible. I just bought two 1TB WD Caviar Blacks for <$150 including shipping and tax. (The WD Caviar Black drives are highly and widely recommended for audio use.)
Do not partition drives EVER as it cuts into the drives performance. The only exception is if you partition your OS drive to use multiple OS’s.
Obviously I didn’t consider backup drives or general storage, you can use almost anything that has enough capacity.
What I have outlined here is what you should be using if you are trying to work in any sort of profession manner, or if you just want a trouble-free installation. A couple of times in my life I have had people shoot guns at me without hitting me. That doesn’t mean I claim that it is safe to stand in front of people firing guns. So, please don’t respond to me with your “I only use a 256 Kb thumb drive and I don’t have any problems” stories…I didn’t get shot either.
There is indeed about a 70 frozen track limit (at 44.1 / 32 bit depth for the freeze files).
A good, 7200 RPM USB3 G-Drive will sustain a little over 100 MB/sec. 70 tracks is about 98 MB/sec.
I will probably end up migrating my USB3 G-Drive to an SSD, and then drop it in one of my free SATA III tray slots (that six tray Icy Dock accessory), so that it’s still somewhat “external.”
And then a removable SSD enclosure with SATA III to USB3 for when mobile.
+1 on the Samsung 840 Pro. That’s what I’m using for almost all my SSDs.
I haven’t needed to RAID 0 two of them together yet, but with the Icy Dock six tray, the potential is there.
Also, I don’t do samples-from-disk streaming, they’re all loaded into RAM, so no IOPS should be used, once the samples are loaded. Which is why I can get away with the sound lib living on my projects drive, but separating them is the better suggestion. I will probably do this, at some point.
Thanks (very lately) to your replies. It seems that Cubase 8 has improved the time spent to save projects, and i’ve moved to VE Pro in regard of the high number of kontakt instances and samples i use.