Best way to distribute samples/instruments across hard disks

[amathie]

I have two 250GB internal hard drives on my Dual 2Ghz G5. I have been told many times that I should store all my "audio" files on one drive and keep the other drive for my operating system and applications. Is this the best way?

Having installed various virtual instrument packages which come with big sample libraries (BFD, Spectrasonics, Yellow Culture, Ivory Pianos etc) I am just begining to think about this again. If audio files and samples are streaming from disc wouldn't it be better to share the job of retrieving them across two disc drive mechanism than one?

[Slogun]

First of all I would have to say that with all that processing power I don't think you have to worry that much about performance issues. Some of those plug-ins doesn't even use disk-streaming technology rather they load the samples to your RAM.
But you do have (at least) one advantage from keeping your files seperated the way you do. It is most probably your "system disk" that you need to re-install into, and the most likely one to be messed up.

That said I would recommend you to keep your libraries on your program/os disk though. But I guess there are different opinions on this...