[Jim Casey]

To begin with at the very least separate your system drive from your music drive - this would be my recommendation and it will be a big improvement. After that, you can get more complicated and resultantly efficient.

That's a good idea to have three drives - a system drive, a session drive and a sample drive. I'm not doing that, but I have to say that sessions are a collection of samples anyway and I'm not going to move the WAV files from my sessions out of the sessions directory and put them on a separate drive ... this depends on how far you want to take this I would imagine. If I hadn't dumped DFH Superior, for example, I would probably have left that and Battery, and perhaps some other sample collection together on their own drive - I certainly have enough drives to do all of the above.

But, I would rather have my sessions and samples on my very fast large hard drive with a large cache than to place other data on to my slower drives at this stage.

I'm getting great performance the way it is, but it's when the projects keep getting bigger and bigger that forces you to look for more ways to improve the performance. Instead of creating a separate drive for samples I would probably prefer going to a Raid system for all of the retrievables. But, of course, this all depends on how much data you have and in some ways the size of the drives, how big the drive cache is (16 mb makes a big difference over 8 or 0) and, of course, how much ram - all of this comes into play.

And don't forget, whatever you do, make sure you have a system to back it up (I have an extra big drive just for backups - of all of it including the system drive).

Also, sometimes (especially on joe blow desktop systems) your Firewire bus or your USB2 bus can only take so much drive traffic especially with Pro Tools hardware sharing the same pathway. So adding another performance drive can actually help to crash your system down.

Right now, I have found that the system is more stable with Pro Tools and the data drive on Firewire and the backup disk through USB2 - if all of them are on the Firewire I absolutely get warnings, glitches and freezes - so I limit the Firewire to the two crucials. Also, I have experimented with running the Firewire drive out the back firewire port of the 002 - but, of course, it performs more quickly plugged straight into the computer.

One step at a time Mr. 14.