Good organizing ideas for new Bandlab installation

[Sven]

I mentioned in a previous thread that I am finally moving Bandlab from an i5 chip with Win 7 to a new i7 gen 11 chip with Win 10.   I've now got plenty of hard disk space and 32 gigs of RAM on the machine.  The C drive is a 1 TB SSD and the D and E drives are partitioned on a 4 TB running at 7200 rpm (thanks for your advice on increasing the rpm speed).

I'm going to start installing all my programs tomorrow on the new beast and I'm curious if anyone has any suggestions of what to do (or not do) for a well organized, professional installation.   For various reason my vst's on my old machine are in too many folders and I'd like to reduce that to fewer folders with this installation.   

I'm most interested in any installation tips that can help Bandlab's performance later.   I'm tired of Freezing my ***** off!   Slightly kidding, of course, but that's been my reality with the big production numbers I've done over the last couple of years.  If I don't freeze most of the soft synths the performance gets bad real fast including random, ugly crashes.  Not a fun way to work!

(This is minor complaint but I thought I'd mention it:   When I go to save vst presets for any given music app (Arturia keys, Amplitude, Ample Guitar, Philharmonik 2, etc...)  it seems to save all over the place depending on the particular app.   I see some obscure Windows method storage areas I would never normally save stuff in (c:\users\public\...grrrrr...).    Again, this is from previous Win 7 experiences.  I'm not sure what to expect using Bandlab with Win 10.   I can currently always see all my previous saved vst settings for any given plugin easily later but I sometimes wonder if there's a cleaner way to organize vst save/load folders.   I blame myself for maybe not taking more time during the original installations to see where things were going.  Maybe I shouldn't be too worried and they're just stored in each app's magical vst save storage area and that's fine because it seem to work. )

I'm not at all worried about making everything work.   I can always make everything appear to work.  I just thought I'd take this rare chance with a clean install to get anybody's thoughts on what methods they like and don't like for organizing Bandlab and other music apps on their machines.  Please let me know if I'm forgetting other things you feel are important.

Thanks!

PS: I plan to buy a new monitor tomorrow when I pick up the machine.  My current monitor is 27" and the table I use is 90 cm wide.  The monitor sits in the very back of the table and I hover about in front of the table with a guitar , keyboard, beer or whatever needs to be played at that given creative moment.  I thought of trying a 32" monitor but I was worried it might be too large for my small setup and my eyes would spend too much time darting about left and right.  Right now the set up feels comfortable but I wouldn't mind a larger screen because my eyes aren't what they used to be.   Any thoughts on this monitor size for my table set up?  Thanks.

[Rickddd]

I'm not an expert at all, but your SSD can eat regular hard drives for supper. However.. a 1 TB SSD system drive doesn't leave oodles of space for decent future growth.  I bought a second SSD 1 TB and run both my projects and cakewalk off of it.  Just say'in.

Edited August 31, 2021 by Rickddd

[Kalle Rantaaho]

...and you are talking about Bandlab or Cakewalk by Bandlab (CbB) ? 

There's confusion about it every now and then here.

[Sven]

This is Cakewalk by Bandlab.

[Sven]

Hi Rickddd,

  I agree that a 2nd SSD drive would make a big speed improvement.  My idea is to use the 7200 rpm 4 TB of extra HD space to get things set up and then buy another SSD drive for the things that need to run fast later.   For now, I want to make sure that my basic system runs fast and I have plenty of room for storage.  I always seems to be running out of space and I don't want to think about that problem fora few years.  

Thanks.

[Sven]

I'm finally going to remove the partitioned 4 TB non-SSD drive from this PC and replace it with two SSD drives (2 TB and 4 TB).  One will have my Cakewalk projects and the larger one will have my VST's. 

This should greatly improve the performance, right?