dual hard drive configuration

I just purchased a new SATA hard drive because my stock IDE drive would struggle when mixing 24+ channels of 96kHz/24-bit audio. I’m going to reformat the old drive and do a clean install of Ubuntu Studio, so I’d like to plan my partitions with audio production in mind now that I have the opportunity. My first thought was to put / on the IDE and /home on the SATA. But I’m wondering if an Ardour session would run more smoothly with everything on the SATA. The new drive will be connected via a PCI SATA controller, so I may discover that /boot needs to be located on the IDE. I won’t know until the parts arrive and I test it out. Here are the drive specs:

Quantum Fireball lct20
4,500 rpm
40 GB
100 MBps maximum external transfer rate
connected via primary IDE port on motherboard

Seagate ST3300622AS
7,200 rpm
300 GB
16 MB buffer
300 MBps maximum external transfer rate
connected via Promise SATA-TX4 PCI card
PCI 2.2-compliant slot (533 MBps peak transfer rate)

Any recommendations on configuring the partitions would be immensely appreciated.

ardour will work notably better if you put sessions on your SATA drive. it has more throughput, less seek latency and is just better in every way. ardour sessions don’t need to be in your home directory.

Thanks, Paul, I’m looking forward to getting everything set up. Do you think the system will run faster if /usr and /lib are also on the SATA drive with the sessions (as opposed to being on the IDE drive with its own dedicated bus)? Do the binaries and libraries typically get loaded to RAM when Ardour starts?