Partitioning a 250gb HD? (Newbie)

[createdculture]

Hi everyone, you all seem to be extremely knowledgable on all things MAC so I was hoping you could help me out. In the past I have never partitioned my hard drives but I always find that somewhere down the road I start to get problems with system performance and crashing programs, etc.

Moving on, I just bought a new 20" aluminum Imac with a 250gb hard drive and I'd like to partition it properly before migrating my files over to the new drive

Any suggestions on how many partitions to setup that would be most efficient? I do a lot of audio recording in Pro Tools, so I'd like to have a good amount of data for audio files. Other than the audio, I don't do any high performance tasking, just a lot of music for iTunes and basic office tools and Internet. Also, will partitioning the drive wipe the disk clean where I'll have to reinstall the OS and iLife?

If you could give me a brief walk through on what to do in disk utility, I'd appreciate it!

Thank you!

 

[Consultant]

Congrats on the new iMac. By the way, Mac is not MAC.

There is NO need to partition drive in OSX for normal use. OSX doesn't get the performance problems windows get.

You might might have a scratch partition or scratch disk, the size depends on what you are working on. I don't use Pro Tools, but I use photoshop and I do have a scratch partition.

With 10.5 Leopard, making a partition doesn't wipe the disk.

DISK UTILITY HAS "help"! Look in there.

 

[ChrisA]

Hi everyone, you all seem to be extremely knowledgable on all things MAC so I was hoping you could help me out. In the past I have never partitioned my hard drives but I always find that somewhere down the road I start to get problems with system performance and crashing programs, etc.

There is no need to partition the drive. It will not make anything work faster. The only reason to partition the drive would be if you needed to have two different file systems. Say maybe on FAT32 and an HFS+ on the same drive. But if the drive is to be used exclusivly with Mac OS X. then make it one partition and HFS+

I don't doubt you had some program crash but the cause has more likely either buggy software or faulty hardware (RAM).