Advice on Building a Computer for Recording/Production?

I did forget to add, the way I've been setting up my desktops is two hard drives. I load windows and programs on my SSD and almost all data on my regular drive. I do all my audio recording to my SSD for the speed increase and if I finish a project, shelf it, or otherwise quit working on it, I move it over to the regular drive. Mostly for size reasons, I only have a 256gb SSD and I don't want to fill it up. That being said I think windows 7 uses something like 20gb throw in programs and such and you're at 40gb used 50 or 60 if you have tons of programs so you still have 190gb free for data which is plenty. I guess if you are a pro studio and are working on lots of sessions at once that might not be the case, but if you are a pro studio I don't think you'd care about the extra $300 to get a bigger drive either.

Loading your OS and programs onto the SSD is definitely how you will see the most speed increase. Things that were already fast you won't notice any difference.

I would also like to add that this has just been my experience. I'm going to feel like total crap if you shell out the cash for a drive and don't get what you're expecting. But I've installed lots of these drives and with one or two brand exceptions I've gotten exactly what I was expecting and more.
 
Building (in my experience) a machine optimized for video (less the expensive graphics card) is a good way to go. 2 years ago I built 2 high powered Win 7 machines running Pro Tools 10 (soon 11) with 3 Avid interfaces, an Avid surface, a Native HD card, SSD system disk, 2 each 2TB Backup drives, 2 each 1TB disks in a RAID 0 configuration (for speed). Processor is a 3+ GHz I7 hex core (Pro Tools 'sees' 12 processors) with 12 GB of memory. Very occasionally does this configuration hiccup. Considered a Mac Pro first which would have cost over $5K. Built the Win 7 machine for $2200. If you are interested in this possibility, I suggest going the the DIY pages on the Videoguys website. Hope this helps.
 
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