Firewire drive: folder, partition, new drive?

FWIW, I have a Seagate FreeAgent Pro 500GB drive. I mainly use it for backups on both OS X (Time Machine) and Windows 7/XP (Norton Ghost). I have the drive split into two equal partitions, one HFS+ and one NTFS. I connect the drive via FW400 to my MBP. I also have a RME Fireface 800 connected via FW800.

I do all of my multitrack recording in Cubase 4 under OS X. I'm using the same partition that houses the Time Machine backups. I have had zero troubles even on songs with 30+ audio tracks (44.1 kHz 24 bit) at low latency (about 3 ms).

Granted, Time Machine will eventually fill up the partition, but I still have plenty of space at the moment. Also, I only keep the audio projects on there while they are in progress. I archive them on my desktop PC once they are finished and free up the space on the external drive again.

You can make do without creating a separate partition, as I have. Just make sure you have plenty of free space when you are working on projects.

 

To me a dedicated external drive is what I would choose. My music is important to me and having anything else on that drive would be unsettling.