Installing cubase on a different drive

Cubase
1

a few month ago, I bought a new pc.
a lot of power and just a very good machine.
it’s been running great and it’s very fast.

my current cubase project is a big one though, so the pc is struggling to keep up and the cpu meter in cubase, is pretty much maxed out.
to try and find a solution that would improve my cpu in cubase, I started to look for tips and settings that supposedly would give me that.
tried a bunch of things and I ended up going too deep and my pc started to crash a lot.

had to take it back to the shop yesterday, to clear the c drive and reinstall windows.

the shop owner is a friend who’s been messing with computers, ever since the early days, so he knows what he’s doing.
he runs a business, where he builds, repairs and sells computers.

i described the problem for him, about cubase needing more cpu and so on.
he said that it’s best to have all installations on a separate drive and only windows on the c drive.
if you have cubase (or any other programs) installed on c, it would be competing with windows for resources and power.
and windows will always have first priority on a pc.

so he suggested that I should install cubase on a different drive.

I’ve asked about this in other places, but before I go ahead and install cubase and a bunch of other programs and plugins, I’d like to know your opinions about this.

ps! I’ll need to install cubase 11 pro, before I install the latest update, right?
or can I install only the update?

2

On any even vaguely modern PC there is no benefit to installing Cubase anywhere but on the system disk. Doing so is asking for trouble, Cubase really prefers to be in its own specific location.

FYI, that is NOT a cpu meter in Cubase. It is a VST Performance meter which looks at a variety of parameters to determine how the VST sound engine is performing. The most common cause of this maxing out (but not the only one at all) is having the audio buffer on your Audio Interface set too low. So trying raising that first. The trade off is raising it will increase latency. If you are running a lot of VSTi’s then Rendering them to Audio can reduce the load, potentially a bunch.

Things that will benefit from being on their own disk:

  • Sound Libraries - they are often large & slow to load. After your System disk this is the next best place to use an SSD
  • Dedicated disk for Cubase Projects - this is the 3rd best place to use an SSD

This was marginal advice a couple of decades ago & even less true now.

Main releases (X.0 and X.5 versions) need to be installed before their updates (X.0.Y or X.5.Y) can be applied.