Hi, Erik. I’m not sure this will help your situation, but most, if not all program files always install to the C drive, no matter what drive they are installed from. I learned from a film school instructor, back in the days when HDDs were your only option on PCs and laptops, that having a separate “media drive” to serve up your media, while letting your C drive’s job only be to run the program, was the best and most efficient way to work with multimedia projects.

Now that we have much faster SSD drives available, I still follow the same formula: C drive for program installation, D drive for cache, histories, media, etc. I also use an external E drive for sample libraries, only, since they tend to eat up hard drive space.

My current setup is this: 256gb C drive (programs), 1tb internal drive D drive (projects), 2tb external E drive (sound libraries). All my drives are SSD and I’m using a Lenovo laptop with an Intel i7 processor ($449 + $150 memory/additional internal drive upgrade). Running on Windows 10.

I get great results from a budget system with a few tweaks and following the media maker’s hard drive rule of thumb.

Anyway, I hope this helps you in some way 🙂