Pro's Vs. Con's on Partitioned HDD?

[nostromo77]

Hello all!

My question is to those with experience working with partitions.

My idea is to do a partition on my main HDD built into my MacBook Pro. The reason I want to do that is to preserve the speed and responsiveness to the MacOS X.

I thought about partitioning the main HDD in my MacBook Pro to have a section on it devoted to the MacOS X operating system only. My dilemma is that I don't know if that even makes any sense to do and how big a size is recommended to partition it for the MacOS. I thought about allocating about 20GB but realized that Final Cut Pro and Adobe CS collection takes up a massive amount of space in the Applications Support folder. Or is that under the user which would then be somewhere on the other half of the partition not shared with the MacOS?

As you can see I'm a bit confused, so if you have any pro idea how to do this or if this is a silly thing to do, please let me know. Also if you have an experienced method to keep the OS responsive please share... my MacOS X have become very sluggish and slow. I have about 100GB left on the 500GB drive and I can't figure out why it's so darn slow. Everything slows down. Especially if I surf online with many windows open it just kills my mac.

So what is the best method to keep your MacOS X running fast and secure?

Any suggestion would be appreciated.

🙂

Thank you

 

[alust2013]

I don't think a new partition would help a whole lot, although a reinstall might. It does sound though like you may be in need of more RAM, as you mentioned it slows down when you have a lot of stuff open.

 

[nostromo77]

I don't think a new partition would help a whole lot, although a reinstall might. It does sound though like you may be in need of more RAM, as you mentioned it slows down when you have a lot of stuff open.

Hmm, you know I hate to admit it, but you may be right. I only have 4GB of Ram. So I guess that's the big killer isn't it? I should get to at least 8GB before it's smooth?

 

[alust2013]

Hmm, you know I hate to admit it, but you may be right. I only have 4GB of Ram. So I guess that's the big killer isn't it? I should get to at least 8GB before it's smooth?

RAM is relatively inexpensive, so I think it would be worth a shot. It certainly couldn't hurt anything.

 

[nostromo77]

RAM is relatively inexpensive, so I think it would be worth a shot. It certainly couldn't hurt anything.

Thank you for replying I think you might be on to something. Clearly when I first got the machine I wasn't working so intensely on it as I am now, clearly Ram wasn't an issue then.

So I guess I'll go out and get Crucial Memory and hope I can feel a difference.

🙂

Thank you for suggesting this.