hard drive priorities

[mr.e]

hey
ok to make a long story short I have my mac pro and its got 2 hard drives on it. one for osx and one for samples. I recently bought a third drive which if faster than all of them. i'm going to move my osx to this new drive because its faster and use the other 2 drives for samples and backup.

My big question is ...since this new drive that i'm gonna be using my operating system on is so big I'm probably going to partition it.. will performance be effected if I use the second partition and fill it up.
or should I just leave it alone

[danbeaulieu]

If your new drive is faster than your old ones which you plan on keeping, your new drive will only go as fast as the other slower drives attached. That's been my experience anyway.


Dan

[mr.e]

If your new drive is faster than your old ones which you plan on keeping, your new drive will only go as fast as the other slower drives attached. That's been my experience anyway.


Dan

sorry I didn't mean faster in rpm I meant it has a bigger buffer

[danbeaulieu]

I see...

Well I can only say in my experience... and I know I need to get a bigger hard drive but that's besides the point.

In my experience with my neko which was optimised my Open Labs. I ordered it with one 80 gig hard drive which was partitioned into C: 40 Gigs and D: 40 Gigs. On the partition that has Windows Xp installed on it (C:) I range between 5 and 10 gigs of open space on it. On my other (D:) drive partition it ranges between 200 Mb and 2 Gb free. I have taxed my system heavily, working on the same projects, and there is no noticeable difference in performance when my hard drive space is low.

Then again I have never had two separate hard drives so maybe my system is even faster than I think. Its pretty damn fast now so I bet its working optimally. I am sure that didn't help but that's my experience.

Dan

[Doc Jones]

if I am understanding it correctly, you are only planning on using the 2nd partition for back up related data?

If that is the case, then your partitioning scheme should be fine (even if you fill up the 2nd partition). As long as you aren't trying to access data off of the 2nd partition when you are doing music work, that 2nd partition shouldn't have any effect on performance.

[///AznTi]

If it was my drive I would just leave the OS drive alone and not partition it.

This way all data written is one large cluster and not so separated.
But thats how I do things. Its really up to you.

Question though, do you really need to create another partition on your main drive or are you just trying to justify why you are wasting the rest of the drive for the OS?

You should do what you originally want. Use the other two drives for back up and store all files there.

For me, I do not like to go over 80 gigs on a main drive.
I'll straight up install it and leave the rest of the space for programs and a separate folder for my VST directory.

Then all my external drives which are 200 gigs are partitioned 4 times NTFS.

I simply store all data on there.

Hope this helps.

[mr.e]

ok guys thanks a lot for your help. at the end I used super duper to clone my os x onto the new 320gb 16mb buffer drive....then I booted up from the new one and the boot up was very slow compared to the original. so at the end i deleted that cloned image and went back to my original setup becauce i didn't feel like installing os x and all my programs and plugins all over on this new drive....so now
I have my original hard drive 1 with osx that came with the mac pro 250gb
hard drive 2 (320gb)- samples and logic projects folders
hard drive 3 (200gb)- has backup of everything and also windows parallels

[danbeaulieu]

Sweet... I need more hard drive space.

[Doc Jones]

smart move mr. e

I've just spent the entire day reloading all my apps, data pointers etc. on my new machine. What a f*king pain in the ass.

[mr.e]

smart move mr. e

I've just spent the entire day reloading all my apps, data pointers etc. on my new machine. What a f*king pain in the ass.

ya I hear that man... the reason I just canceled the whole super duper image clone 2 new fast drive was cause I saw theres obvious performance lag compared to the original installation for some reason..even know its supposed to be an exact copy of the drive it still worked way slower. So my only option from there was to install everything manually to the new drive.
Its obvious the performance lag was because I just cloned it and didn't do a fresh install ..I'm not down to sit for hours again and install 100 plugins and all the software that I use at this time. lazy me

[Doc Jones]

yeah, it's insane. I literally didn't think it was going to take long at all.

I figured I had already built and tweaked the os, so no big deal - just load up some apps, vsts, efx etc. - couple of hours tops.

Started at 9:00am this morning and am just finishing up now - almost 12 hours to properly reinstall all my programs.

That's why I am so happy I bought a mobo that can handle a quad core -
some time next year I will upgrade to the quad, overclock and not have to go through this for 4 years (I hope)

[mr.e]

so you don't reinstall your computer for couple years at a time? just curious because thats what i'm planning lol

[Doc Jones]

yeah, this last computer (Pentium IV 3.0ghz) last about 3.5 years.
I really didn't do to much to it after the initial install (besides upgrades, patches etc.)

I just ran a quick test with my new machine. Loaded up a song that pegged my older machine at 95% cpu usage - crackles and pops etc.
The new machine (which is a dual core) shows both cores at 20% at most!!
Amazing!!