Moving DAWs. VSTs, etc. to other hard drives.

I'm working out certain changes to my equipment and methods, and it occurs to me that perhaps moving stuff around from one drive to another is not as easy as ABC. Can all that
licensed stuff simply be copied, or do some things need installing on a new drive or..... what? I'm not computerish enough to work it out, at least not with any confidence.
Thank you.
 
Programs will need to be re-installed. With luck you will still have registration keys and/or other security bits and pieces. For example, if you use Reaper, you will need to copy the Reaper licence key across, then point Reaper to it.

Some vsts can just be copied across, specially if they are just dll files. Others come with instal programs, and they may not be so amenable to copying across.
 
I keep usually the program on the original installation disk, C: Otherwise, you have to reinstall. As Gekko stated, VSTs and working directories are different.

For most VST's, you can just move the folder and get the DAW to point to the new location. Depending on the software, it might need re-authorization. Waves licenses their VSTs to the computer, so moving the DLLs are pretty simple. I know other companies are a bit more challenging.
 
Thanks for those replies. Leaving the DAW on the main disk is certainly an option. Should anything else be left on there?
 
What DAW are you using? I think working directory and where everything is stored are configurable on most DAWs. It might be just moving VSTs and where working files are stored are usually enough. Those are the items that grow.
 
I have the DAW (Reaper) and the installed VSTs on the main drive. Everything else is on external drives, including the licence keys, VST source files, project and data files.
 
I have the DAW (Reaper) and the installed VSTs on the main drive. Everything else is on external drives, including the licence keys, VST source files, project and data files.

I understand (rightly or wrongly) that the DAW being on the same drive as data files is a bad idea because reading from the DAW files and writing data files back to the same drive can cause bottlenecks, eh? If second party VSTs (and not a zillion of them) are on the main drive with the DAW, would that cause bottlenecks or conflicts, that is, two drives instead of three?
 
I understand (rightly or wrongly) that the DAW being on the same drive as data files is a bad idea because reading from the DAW files and writing data files back to the same drive can cause bottlenecks, eh? If second party VSTs (and not a zillion of them) are on the main drive with the DAW, would that cause bottlenecks or conflicts, that is, two drives instead of three?

Many sensible words of wisdom are not as critical as they once were, given the improvements in performance of computers over the years. I think that saving data on the same drive as the DAW is a bad idea, but not because of data reading and writing, but instead because it's like too many eggs in the one basket. I like the data to be separate so it is easily accessible by other computers.

All my VSTs are on the main drive, but that doesn't include soundfontsand other samples, which are on a separate drive.
 
I’m a Cubans user and have pro 11 on the studio machine but elements on my MacBook and on the office video editing pc, my files are available via my NAS and the big sampler packages are on the office and studio machine but not on the MacBook. I can work on things anywhere. The messages tell me certain plugins are not there, and on the MacBook lots of samples are missing, but I can edit and tweak and then it takes little time to point to the libraries back in the studio. I think it actually works better now than ever before. Not finding things is to terminal any more. Elements has lots of missing menu items, but I’ve discovered that the only thing that annoys me is groups and via tracks which just don’t work. Oddly things like tempo tracks which don’t display, are actually there, and function!
 
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