Partition Advice- 200GB HD Install

[dabirdwell]

Well it's time to upgrade the ol dual 867 and I have ordered a gig of RAM on a single chip and a Western Digital 200GB hard drive.

It's really my fiance's computer (architecture projects), but it's also our main home computer and i use it to keep up with our digital photos, music etc. Plus, I am beginning to do some Final Cut Express editing of family videos and creative projects.

I want to know what the optimum setup would be for my use of the hard drive space. Do i need to partition a chunk for video editing only? Does the OS need a partition? Should I change the placement or contents of the existing 60GB drive?


Any advice appreciated.

[peterjhill]

I remember partitioning my 80 MB HD in my first powermac. I was amazed when the zip disk came out that it was larger than my HD.

Now with OS X, I really don't see any reason to partition a HD. You might consider (might) using Disk Utility to create a mirrored raid set with your 60 GB drive and your 200 GB drive. You would have one volume that was 60 GB and one that was 140 GBs. If you can spare the space, it would buy you some nice redundancy on your boot disk. I would use the 140 GB volume to hold your projects, but anything you want safe, put on the mirrored drives.

This does not save you from having the entire computer stolen, blown up, hit by a meteor. It does give you an instant backup. I would still use backup.app or something similar to back up important files and settings.

If you don't want to do the raid set, I would just install it and make an alias in you home directory for a folder on the new disk, or else use panther to add in the finder favorites the important folders.

I would not break up the 200 MB drive just because you can. You will end up running out of room on a partition and it will be a pain to fix the problem.