Originally Posted by Matt Finley
I agree that some files such as the PG fonts do get installed on the boot drive regardless of any other decision. But I think a minimal install can be performed to a drive of your choice.
Correct - fonts and the plugin are always installed to the system drive, regardless of where you want to install BB. These don't take up much space though, under 1gb.

Originally Posted by Matt Finley
Likewise I know the RealTracks and RealDrums can be on the same or different drive of your choice. Potentially this could involve three different drives.
Four in fact - it's possible to have your system drive contain only the fonts and plugin, a second drive for the BB app, a third for RealTracks, and a fourth for Drums. Not that I'd necessarily suggest doing that though.

Originally Posted by Guitarhacker
a couple of seconds is not an inconvenience to me
Precisely.

In my opinion, I find it easiest and best to have BB and the Realtracks all installed into one location - either install everything to internal, or everything to external. The speed boosts from having the app on internal storage vs USB typically are only noticeable in program launch time - once it's running there isn't much difference (except if you're using USB 2.0 or slower). The downside with having BB/Realtracks/Drums in different locations is that the operating system sometimes changes the mount point for external drives - this isn't a problem if you run everything from the external or internal as BB simply accesses the files from the same folder the app is in, but once they're outside of that folder if the path changes then BB suddenly won't be able to find your RT/RD's.

In practice this doesn't happen that often, but it's happened to me often enough that I prefer everything in one place.

I work here