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2A Batterie

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 9, 2004
622
0
Out of a Suitcase, USA
I can't take it any longer... I need to add more hard drive space. I'm thinking of buying a 1TB HD to stick inside of my G5 and then replacing my 160gb boot drive with a 500 gb boot drive. The drive with 1 terrabyte of space is going to be used mainly for my music library. Yes, I know how big it is and yes, I know how many songs is needed to fill that thing up. I encode all of my music with Apple Lossless and I receive 2-5 new CDs a week. With my already huge amount of music, the files add up quick.

My main question with the 1TB drive is if I should partion it. For example, I'm thinking of doing four 250gb partition... one for A-E, one for F-L and so on. I'm thinking of partitioning so that the one hard drive won't totally crawl. Is this unnecessary for me to do? Should I just get an external drive so that I don't have to swap out drives when I upgrade computers?

I'm also purchasing the 500gb internal drive to be my boot drive and store some other non-music files on. I'm thinking of separating it up into an applications partition, a photo partition, and a video partition.

Am I making this process too complicated?
 

emptyCup

macrumors 65816
Jan 5, 2005
1,482
1
If I were buying a 1 TB drive I would get an external to make it easier to move when I upgraded machines. This is a personal choice, however. Dividing the drive into four partitions doesn't speed up access. It actually forces the drive head to move more to reach the various partitions. If you don't have a good reason for partitioning, such as using different file systems on each partition, there is no point in doing it.
 

2A Batterie

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 9, 2004
622
0
Out of a Suitcase, USA
Thanks for the heads up. I've always been told to partition my hard drives, especially when working with audio. I usually have my external FW drives partitioned according to projects, so when I'm editing audio in Pro Tool my hard drive isn't scanning across 500gb or more for one audio file.
 

panzer06

macrumors 68040
Sep 23, 2006
3,282
229
Kilrath
I can't take it any longer... I need to add more hard drive space. I'm thinking of buying a 1TB HD to stick inside of my G5 and then replacing my 160gb boot drive with a 500 gb boot drive. The drive with 1 terrabyte of space is going to be used mainly for my music library. Yes, I know how big it is and yes, I know how many songs is needed to fill that thing up. I encode all of my music with Apple Lossless and I receive 2-5 new CDs a week. With my already huge amount of music, the files add up quick.

My main question with the 1TB drive is if I should partion it. For example, I'm thinking of doing four 250gb partition... one for A-E, one for F-L and so on. I'm thinking of partitioning so that the one hard drive won't totally crawl. Is this unnecessary for me to do? Should I just get an external drive so that I don't have to swap out drives when I upgrade computers?

I'm also purchasing the 500gb internal drive to be my boot drive and store some other non-music files on. I'm thinking of separating it up into an applications partition, a photo partition, and a video partition.

Am I making this process too complicated?

I always make a couple of partitions so that one can be a bootable copy of my system drive that can be brought up is something happens to the main system. I use superduper to keep them in sync.

cheers,
 

pprior

macrumors 65816
Aug 1, 2007
1,448
9
Partitioning will in no way speed up access. The 1gb drives are all WAY faster than you'll need for audio playback, etc, so just stick that bad boy in and enjoy it.
 

Sean Dempsey

macrumors 68000
Aug 7, 2006
1,622
8
Partitioning will in no way speed up access. The 1gb drives are all WAY faster than you'll need for audio playback, etc, so just stick that bad boy in and enjoy it.

On this very forum, people claim that partitioning your drives and placing different files on the inner and outer rings of the hard drive platter will make a difference in speed. Are you saying there is no different in speeds when the data is on the inner rings of the platter, or the outer rings of the platter?

Or is this one of those things that will forever be argued with no one able to prove either side?
 

kuebby

macrumors 68000
Jan 18, 2007
1,582
13
MD
Or is this one of those things that will forever be argued with no one able to prove either side?

I think it's one of those things. Because in addition to it being something of a subjective argument, every HD is different.
 

pprior

macrumors 65816
Aug 1, 2007
1,448
9
On this very forum, people claim that partitioning your drives and placing different files on the inner and outer rings of the hard drive platter will make a difference in speed. Are you saying there is no different in speeds when the data is on the inner rings of the platter, or the outer rings of the platter?

Or is this one of those things that will forever be argued with no one able to prove either side?

That's just silly.

The facts:

1) Outer platter transfer speeds are significantly faster than inner
2) Therefore the fuller a drive is, the slower it will be (plus the additive effect of longer seek times, though this is minimal unless doing a lot of small file access or multiuser / server situation)
3) Partitioning does not do anything to alter these facts.

Now one could construct a situation where you have one type of data that you always want to be faster access than others - for example you have video editing data that will be used in editing and frequently moved in and out, and then other data such as large mp3 collection that is rarely accessed. In that situation putting the mp3s into a different partition lying on the inner part of the platters would save the higher performance territory for the data you want fastest access too.

However, for the vast majority of people the difference is small. Transfer rates on modern 1TB range drives are high and even the inner rim is faster than the fastest hard drives were just a couple years ago.

Some people obsess over getting every drop of performance out of a computer - if that's you, then by all means partition away. However IMO it just makes life much more complicated without any significant benefit. Far easier to just make sure you update to larger drives as you start to fill the old one up.

Cheers.
 
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