Okay...... Went into Disk Utility again and it has "230GB" in the name, so I'm assuming it was always that size and I never figured it out. Either way, I'm delighted that I have a larger hard drive than I thought
But my earlier question still stands: Is this pointless?
I know for a fact having two separate drives (physically two drives, not one drive partitioned), using one for your DAW and one for your data is a much better and efficient way to operate. But is one drive partitioned into Software and Data an equally (or even just better) way to operate?
Sorry for babbling on
I don't see a reason to use two partitions or two drives, generally speaking. Your audio app is resident in RAM, the OS is resident in RAM, and the only stuff that's being loaded from or written to the drive is your audio data. The only way it should make any noticeable difference is if you don't have enough RAM and your machine is paging to the hard drive frequently (in which case you should get more RAM). Otherwise, it shouldn't make even one track difference in your track count between using one drive or two, one partition or two.
As an exception, however, if you're doing a lot of stuff with virtual instruments, it may be useful to put the VI samples on a separate drive from your audio data (not a separate partition) because those files presumably are getting read during the normal course of playing and recording audio.
As for having it on a separate volume to make reinstalling easier, that hasn't been important for a long time. At least in recent versions of Mac OS X, every install is an "archive and install", so the old OS is moved aside, the new one installed, and everything that isn't part of the OS gets put back the way you left it (with the possible exception of third-party drivers). It's about as painless as you can get. The days of needing to wipe your system drive and reinstalling from scratch are but a distant memory.
And in the unlikely event that you need to wipe and reinstall because of filesystem corruption or something, that's what Time Machine backups are for. You wipe the drive, stick in a Leopard or later install disc, tell it to restore from the backup, and you're back in business.
I used to partition drives all the time. I no longer find it useful unless I'm testing beta OS builds or something. It just doesn't provide much benefit, but creates a lot of headaches in terms of free space management.
BTW, if you don't have a Time Machine backup drive, you should get one. It's so easy to use that you'd be crazy not to. Using your main drive as the backup drive, as noted previously, is pretty much a waste of disk space. About $70-75 bucks will get you a 1TB external that's more than big enough for backups. Don't use it for anything other than backups. Your backup drive must be more than double your main drive's total capacity or else you won't be able to use it usefully as a backup drive.
Just my $0.02.
