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Installation "Best Practice" . . . ?

Russell

By Russell
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Russell

Russell

Posted
Posted

I'm going to be transitioning Cake to a new PC in the next week. I will be (for purposes of getting *everything* I can) Installing Sonar Platinum X2, Platinum X3 and then CakebyBL.

I have at my disposal 3 SSD Drives in the new machine. Obviously the "C" drive will have the OS. I'm wondering what file locations would be best for the main Cake/Sonar programs, VSTs / Instruments and Project files

My first thought is leave Cake on the C then split VSTs on the second drive and Project files on the remaining drive.

What say y'all? Does this seem to be the best layout? I will also have two USB 3.0 External Drives for downloads, storage and my extensive music library. Not sure if putting anything on those would be wise but if it will work fast enough I'm OK with it. Just want to get the best performance I can out of the limited resources available

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scook

scook

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13 minutes ago, Dega said:

My first thought is leave Cake on the C

This is what I did along with all the 3rd party plug-ins.

Some plug-ins have large collections of data files (such as sample libraries). These support files go on data drives (IOW anywhere but C).

Projects and associated audio go on its own drive separate from C and plug-in data.

 

As for install order see 

 

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Grem

Grem

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Posted (edited)

@Russell to elaborate further, in CW there are options to tell the program where to find stuff. So I choose to put CW Content folder on another drive besides C:\ and in the Preferences\Files\Folders I point CW in that direction. 

Edited by Grem
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PopStarWannabe

PopStarWannabe

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On 10/25/2022 at 11:04 PM, scook said:

Projects and associated audio go on its own drive separate from C

Why can't all be on a single SSD?

I know that 15 years ago (when almost only HDDs and RAID were around) one had the "scattered" configurations: OS and programs on a drive, projects+audio on a second and samples on a third.

But now, when reading and writing to an SSD is so fast and not "phisical" at all, what are the benefits of having 3 SSDs? Are there any speed benefits? Are the samples of virtual instruments not loaded into RAM anyway?

If one permanently backed up projects on an external drive/in the cloud, would a single internal SSD not be enough? Think laptops for instance: they mostly have just one storage device. And you can back up externally/in the cloud.

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mettelus

mettelus

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There is no reason why you cannot. It really comes down to preference, system limitations, and how you do backups. You can still pull data faster from multiple sources (even SSDs), but the speed of an SSD would make that minimal (also system dependent). My reason is I keep my C drive small for imaging purposes (the only drive I image), so I have a lot of directory junctions to other drives (even programs, since another SSD is faster than the C on my machine).

For most laptops, options are limited for number of drives, so focusing on one isn't a bad thing. Just bear in mind that SSDs typically do not give warning for failure, so be sure to backup data regularly (reading them does not damage them as much as writing to them does).

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Grem

Grem

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Like mettelus says, you can get by with one drive. I do it all the time on my Surface Pro 3!! But it does fill up fast and I can't do as much with it as my desktop. But it definitely works well. I record with it, run vsti's, and mix with it. 

However, on my desktop I want my audio on a drive separate from my system drive.

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abacab

abacab

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On 2/16/2023 at 1:01 AM, mettelus said:

My reason is I keep my C drive small for imaging purposes (the only drive I image), so I have a lot of directory junctions to other drives (even programs, since another SSD is faster than the C on my machine).

Agree. My desktop C drive is a 500GB NVMe M.2 SSD that is only at about 50% used. I make a scheduled full image backup using Macrium Reflect every night, with moderate compression, that takes about 35-40 mins.

My C drive contains my software executables and plugins, plus my documents and projects. But the plugin content goes on my secondary internal D drive, also an SSD. But that is almost 2 TB of data that doesn't change frequently, so I only make a full image of that drive monthly. My projects fit fine on my C drive as I mostly work with MIDI, and don't record much audio.

But YMMV in that regard. I believe many users benefit from organizing their projects on a separate drive. In some cases users may want to keep their active projects on their SSD until the project is finished, then archive the finished project files and master elsewhere on HDD, to free up the space for another project.

I also have a couple of HDD internal SATA drives that I use for archives, and I put my image files on several external USB3 HDDs. I always keep at least one of these USB drives disconnected and stored away from my PC, for a worst case scenario. Critical files get backed up as needed to the cloud as an extra copy, but not the entire system.

If my main system ever goes sideways due to malware, a bad driver, sketchy program install, or a troublesome update, I can restore the C drive back to the last drive image in about 20 minutes using the rapid delta restore in Macrium Reflect Home. It sure beats the prospect of re-installing Windows or spending time trying to figure out how to clean up a mess left behind after I tried to uninstall an offender.

I could live with one drive on my workstation, as I do with my laptop. But that's not as flexible because it's everything or nothing as far as backups and restores.

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Grem

Grem

Posted
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1 hour ago, PopStarWannabe said:

Why?

Because that's what I want. I have my reasons. Which include but are not limited to ones already mentioned in this thread.

Organization
Backup purposes
Performance
But most of all: If it ain't broke...

:)

Like a lot of users here I have a M2 drive for my system. And I want that drive to stay lean and clean, for the same reasons (see above) I keep my audio on a seperate drive.

 

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mettelus

mettelus

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2 hours ago, Grem said:

And I want that drive to stay lean and clean

Something to also bear in mind with this... if you want to fill up a drive FAST... load audio and video files onto it (why samples and projects are typically on a second drive). Add in temporary/working directories (another thing to point to another drive if a program has the option in preferences), and you will start getting projects/temp files in the GB realm.

As you start chewing up disk space, there are several utilities out there that can show you what is taking up space and where (I use TreeSize Free). Depending how big your C drive is, you will get to a point where you will have to start managing the space on it. For CbB, doing a "Save As..." to another folder will only copy files in use by that project; and if you want to keep the rest just in case, an external drive is a good option if on a laptop, then you can keep only projects being worked on the laptop itself.

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Starship Krupa

Starship Krupa

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For me, the C:=OS and programs and D:=plug-ins and most data is about logistics rather than performance.

IME, if a drive is going to get corrupt, it's usually the system drive. Makes sense, it's pretty much constantly in action with Windows 10/11. So I split the points of failure. C: drive gets boogered to the point where I have to reformat or replace it, well, at least my data and plug-ins and libraries are still in place and mostly I won't need to reinstall them.

According to Jim Roseberry (who should know), streaming multiple audio files simultaneously doesn't tax even a 7200 RPM spinner very much. The drive isn't the bottleneck for that, so projects can go on a slower drive.

My C: drives are all NVMe PCIe, while my other drives are either SATA SSD's or rusty spinners. Anything I want to load as fast as possible, like OS startup and programs, goes on the fastest drive. Nothing else even matters as far as perceptible difference in speed.

And on my laptop, I have a single 1TB NVMe, so not even a hard and fast rule.

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