External HD - To Partition, or Not to Partition?

M. Bréqs · Post by **M. Bréqs** » Sat Apr 15, 2006 9:13 pm

Hey all.

Just picked up an external hard drive for my notebook. I plan to use it for recording and playback of samples from live, and not much else.

My question:

Should I partition it? What creative uses for partitioning can be used? I mean, would it make sense to have a sample library on one partition, and record to another partition? What about the concept of putting my application (Live 5.03 for now) on the external?

I'm just trying to keep the drive's read and write heads moving as little as possible, so as to keep a fast seek time up. Advice is appreciated.

MB

rbmonosylabik · Post by **rbmonosylabik** » Sun Apr 16, 2006 12:19 am

If your internal HD is big and fast enough, I'd suggest partitioning it Software and Samples and leave the external HD for Recording. If it's not, partition the external one for Recording and Samples. Leave Live in the same one as your other software (internal most likely)

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Sun Apr 16, 2006 12:59 am

i think i've read recently some arguments against partitioning. i'm thinking of it this way: if you create 2 x 50G partitions on a 100G drive, and are using both actively in your audio workflow, then you are guaranteeing that you'll be reading/writing over two locations that are at least half way across the drive. if it was all one drive, i would be surprised if it went out of it's way to skip to the other end of the disk, when there was blank space near the beginning.

i know jack about how a drive really works though so i could be completely off base

a smaller partition will defrag faster. and i think you're supposed to format an audio drive with large blocks so that it will take less total reads to stream a huge file

digitaljunkie · Post by **digitaljunkie** » Sun Apr 16, 2006 9:05 am

from a technical point of view I am dead set against partitioning.

onslaught · Post by **onslaught** » Mon Apr 17, 2006 1:11 am

Using it as one volume means that it'll be much more flexable when you work out your own organizational style for it and want to move things around. You could say have the first two folders 'samples' & 'recording' and then branch out from there.[/u]

Jajah · Post by **Jajah** » Mon Apr 17, 2006 2:42 am

Partition.

Make several ~20 Gigs drives out of your HD, internal or external. You won't regret it, ever. You might feel sorry with a single 120 Gig (+) partition.

My 2 coppers,

M. Bréqs · Post by **M. Bréqs** » Mon Apr 17, 2006 5:13 pm

Interesting - not much consensus here! I've decided not to partition, since if I'm recording and playing back samples from two different partitions on the same drive at the same time, the read / write heads will be moving back n' forth a lot more...

But for file management, I would love to partition...

c'est la vie.

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Tue Apr 18, 2006 1:37 am

Jajah wrote:Partition.

Make several ~20 Gigs drives out of your HD, internal or external. You won't regret it, ever. You might feel sorry with a single 120 Gig (+) partition.

My 2 coppers,

this is what i thought when i formatted my drives. but when my itunes library passed 20G, then off i went to partition magic, and that's a stress bucket. i've killed my computer a couple of times trying to merge partitions and resize and all that.

you've got to consider carefully what you are going to use each partition for before you can decide on a size. for instance if you're going to screw around with dual booting linux, then yes you are going to probably want some small partitions. for media, keep them pretty large

j0shu@ · Post by **j0shu@** » Tue Apr 18, 2006 1:59 am

i would not partition an external drive.

partition your internal drive with a system [c:] drive and a data drive, but if an external is only used for data i would not part it.

the only benefit would be if there was a drive failure you might only lose that particular partition, but i dont think i would do it personally.