Does partitioning exteranl hard drives reduce transfer speeds?

[kwfl]

i am seeking advice here
i recieved My new WD My Book Pro 750GB to be added the another one i have.

i am planning to do some video editing and animation (avid and after effects) .. as a hobby though ..
i have and iMac, Al 2.8 24" 4GB

i wanna use one as a storage bin to my files ....
i wanna use the other for video and animation stuff.

but i want to use both platforms, mac and windows
so my firt guess is format this hard drive as 1 HFS+ and 1 NTFS for both platforms. but the reason i got the My Book Pro is its reliability and the fast FW800 port. As my Al iMac has only 1 FW800 port, i will be able to use only one hard drive with FW800 at a time. I dont like switching cables every time i reboot. (this is why i dont want to format the drives both drives as NTFS or HFS+ unpartitioned)

so
the question is, will the partitioning affect the speed i get from the FW800?

if i opt to format one drive as HFS+ and the other as NTFS, will the backup files affect the performance of the drive when it is used intensively for video editing?. I mean, a dedicated drive could be better than a drive filled with something else.

another thing
Under xp

i did a speed test and it took 00:02:34 to write an image (4.5GB) to the exteranl drive via FW800.

does that seem good?
My concern here is that, when i gave the copy command (under xp of course) the estimated time remaining was as follows

2mins when about 8% of the file written
30mins for about 60s and transfer made it up to 15%
60s when about 20% of the file written and reduced gradually till the file was completely written

under Leopard and formatted HFS+ it took 00.01.59 to write the same image.

why is this so? Under mac u get nice speeds and steady performance.
is this driver issue or is it just like windows s***s?!

thanks for reading and for your expected opinion.

 

[Fuzzbear]

i am seeking advice here

My concern here is that, when i gave the copy command (under xp of course) the estimated time remaining was as follows

2mins when about 8% of the file written
30mins for about 60s and transfer made it up to 15%
60s when about 20% of the file written and reduced gradually till the file was completely written

under Leopard and formatted HFS+ it took 00.01.59 to write the same image.

why is this so? Under mac u get nice speeds and steady performance.
is this driver issue or is it just like windows s***s?!

thanks for reading and for your expected opinion.

Not sure how it is in Leopard or OSX as i have limited experience there, but when copying large amounts of data, the time given is an estimate based on the current load on the entire system at the time.

For example, lets say with nothing else going on in the background on my windows PC, i grab a folder that contains about 20GB of MP3's and drag and drop that to an external drive. Windows will give me an estimate of how long it will take to complete the file transfer with its "time remaining" on the file copy dialog. If I happen to fire up some other application that is particularly memory/cpu intensive or itself needs to have a lot of file access you can watch the "time remaining" start to increase because windows is moving some of the system resources away from that copy operation. If I close or complete the background application, while the copy task is going on...the estimated time will decrease.

 

[kwfl]

Fuzzbear
i totally agree with you .. but
in my test
Nothing running on the background
i am copying only one file
not doing anything during transfer other than watching my stop watch.
my iMac should be powerful enough to withstand any small changes in cpu usage, in case something ran by itself.

almost in all cases, when i start the copying, it seems like transferring the first 15% of the file taking so much time and then it goes so quick.

Unless the transfer window is not giving representative info of what is actually going on, i am accusing xp of inability to handle file transfers efficiently and allowing for sustained file transfers.