Hard Drive Partitioning

[mchimes]

Hi,

Does anyone have some opinions on HD Partitioning. I just got a G4 w/ glyph ATA drive and want to keep it clean.

What are the pros, cons of partitioning and how do you do it?

Also, what are some good habits to get into for keeping HD clean and efficient?

Thanks- Mike

[JacoMon]

Splitting your drive into smaller peices will allow it to not have to make as large of a jump from place to place to read data, increasing efficiency. Also, if you go to defrag etc it is easier to work on a smaller peice. If one gets corrupted, you have also lost less. You can also use one as a bounce-to back-up partition. These are a few of the advantages. Always use a separate physical drive for your audio. Put your software on a different drive. Since I also use my computer for such things as this forum, I have my internal drive split into two partitions. One is for music software only, the other has things such as the internet, that way if something weird comes over the modem, its at least on a different partition than my music stuff.
I also split my audio drive for the afore-mentioned reasons.

[Boogs]

I agree that partitioning is a good idea at least for musicians. I have a smallish drive for the internet/general use, and a larger one with two partitions. The largest partition (14 of 17 Gb) of the bigger drive is an archive of finished (really finished, never touch again ever etc.) programs and their stereo mixes. Whenever I burn a CD they are all their and I almost never have to repair/defragment this part of the disk as I almost never change or move any of it's contents, I just add things one at a time. The smaller partition (3 Gb) is for my music programs, archives of drum sounds, open songs, and a place to temporarily store a song's audio files (and sequencer programs) until I back them up to CD-RW. I don't keep these on the disk to save space and avoid the temptation to endlessly tinker with old recordings. The smaller drive contains files that are updated, re-arranged, changed, or deleted after backup and needs regular maintenance, which is faster and easier if they are kept separate. Sorry for the long post!