Optimizing hard drive speeds.

[BeyondMountains]

I have two internals (300gb,1tb)
and several externals.

I want to optimize my file placement for speed and working. I mostly run logic studio.

How should I do this?

Right now all the programs and project files are on the 300gb drive.
I'm willing to buy an additional drive.

[JPamplin]

Well, it really depends on what kind of work you're doing. I would imagine that the 1TB drive has better benchmarks than the 300GB, simply from having higher density which leads to better data throughput per platter revolution.

A trick I've found is to partition a higher density drive with a smaller partition on the top (read: outside of the platters) as your boot drive, and place OS X and your apps on it, then locate your documents on the second partition (or even span it to that 300GB internal drive if space is a factor).

Then span your externals together into a Time Machine backup volume as space is needed. Your externals probably won't have the throughput that internals have, but I could be wrong on that if they're FW800, I haven't got any to test).

Try that and see how that goes.

JP