I've never really understood why someone would want to partition drives. Inevitably one partition gets full while another still has space and then you have to re-partition using tools not written by Apple, which IMHO puts all your data at risk (of course...things are backed up), but it all just sounds like a hassle. I would just use folders. There is no speed increase associated with partitioning AFAIK.
First of all, if you plan ahead, you really shouldn't run into issues of some partition being too big or two small. I have all my laptop drive and all my externals partitioned into 3 or 4 different volumes and the only time I have ever had a problem was because I wasn't paying enough attention and accidentally made a partition smaller than I was planning. If I had correctly executed my plan, there would have been no issues. Also, i hear leopard's disk utility can resize partitions. I can't comment on this or how stable it is because I have yet to upgrade to leopard.
While it isn't nearly as much as using different physical disks, there is a performance increase in using partitions vs. not using partitions mostly based on disk fragmentation, I posted explaining this here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/400432/
Also, partitioning gives you organizational benefits you don't get by using folders, as you can wipe one without touching the others. This is really useful for dealing with OS upgrading/downgrading as it won't mess with your files.
Sorry,not to sound harsh,but that systems seems to be about the dumbest setup ever?
You have practically a raid 10 setup,without any benefits of the raid.
AND you have program,scratch AND files on the same disk, A?
That way you would propably get abysmal performance, as the program would need to search the disk,scratch would use the disk AND you would have the files would use it for r/w.
So you would have the system to jump around the disk all the time,from sector to sector,doing its assigned tasks.Not good.
Simplify,simplify,simplify.
If you are not doing overly I/O intensive jobs (video) a setup like:
A) OS + Programs
B) Scratch
C) Files
D) Backup for all above
could be feasible,if you have 4 disks?
Ok,the A) disk would be only quarter full,witch is ok speed wise. B) Disk would be empty. C) would almost be full D) would be full eventually,but you could extend externally.
Or you could make a raid10 disk.Simpler,faster and cleaner.
While a separate physical disk is ideal for scratch, this is only possible if you have the space available. I won't know for sure until I get my Mac Pro and have had a chance to load it up with RAM, but it seems to me, if you cnabring your virtual memory size down to zero with using physical RAM you will be doing very little I/O on your startup disk and so a partition there will not hurt you. If you are paging out to disk a lot, perhaps a scratch partition on a file volume (if nothing else available) might work better. I plan to keep some blank partitions for scratch/recording on all my disks, because I can see situations where different disks would be more active than in other situations--so if you are in tune with which disks are busy when, you can pick the best scratch solution per situation.
I think the main reason he wants to put other partition on his startup volume is to make some use of that space and I don't think this is necessarily a bad idea. In addition to putting a scratch on every disk (if a separate scratch disk is not available) there is such a thing as files for which performance is not a big deal. A file partition on the startup volume could be used for things like an MP3 collection or archive of completed projects that since you are no longer working on you don't need big performance boosts.
The BEST thing you can do IMO as far as using up that wasted space on your startup disk is to have two partitions dedicated to OS and apps. This way, you can clone your OS/APP partition before you do any sort of OS or App upgrading, this way, if the upgrade sucks, you can startup from your cloned partition as if nothing happened. This sort of partition has been a very important part of my life because OS updates sometimes break audio drivers.
As far as having an almost RAID 1+0 without the benefits I would entertain the possibility that your same partition scheme on a RAID 1+0 may be worth investigating...as I said in my last post, I have never RAIDed, so I am not going to weigh in one way or another on this.
So there is a bunch of thoughts with no real suggestions, but some stuff worth thinking about. If anything in this or the other post I linked are not clear, let me know, and I'll try to clear it up.
P.S. Anyone know of a utility for benchmarking HD read/write performance. I've got some unorthadox HD and partition plans for my Mac Pro (not going to post them...yet...because I don't want to confuse the issues here--my plans have to do with some of my computer music programing and disk audio streaming needs that aren't really related to this thread) and I'm curious to test out my different partitions/drives for performance.
P.P.S. Check out
www.bigbluelounge.com as your get into your audio hobbying. Good osx audio forum.
