Thanks Conman. I’ve been defragging pretty regularly and after the latest cubase disc overload Win7 stated my D:/ drive was 0% fragmented. These latest overloads have been with only 2 plugins in the whole project (2 seperate instances of Cubases Guitar Amp Rack VST).
I’ve today ordered a new internal hard drive which I’m planning on using as a dedicated Cubase drive. In fact, I’ve ordered two today, the first was a mistake (it was 2TB, but only 5400 rpm and having read these forums it seems that might be a bad idea), but I’ve now ordered a new 1TB 7200 rpm HD and I’ll sell the 5400 one.