Should I partition and whats the best setup?

[ThaArtist]

I've seen some people have like 10-15 different partitions for things... which say the reason is for defragment purposes of certain drives and incase one fails others will still be in tact?

For instance. On one computer I do recording audio, bands, rappers, mixing, making beats.... I also do design with photoshop flash etc. for clients and personal websites... programming with php and etc etc using dreamweaver whatever... and its a personal pc also with personal photos documents backups etc.

Ive see people have a whole partition just for their documents... whatsup? I never really understood the benefits... lemme know!

one guy had windows only on one partition... only programs on another partition, only documents on another partition etc.

Would that cause conflicts?

I think I should atleast make a partition for the studio aspect... making beats, recording artists, projects, songs... What do you think? Im kind of clueless to partitions.

And what happens if you underestimate one and it almost is about to get full? can you reset the partition limit?

i think im going to do more research on partitions too.

 

[Hades]

whatsup? I never really understood the benefits... lemme know!

There's several reasons people partition, but it's a thing that seems to have somewhat fallen out of favor with many given the great availability and proliferation of cheap, fast, more reliable hard drives; the addition of another drive meets some of the benefits of partitioning, making it less necessary these days than maybe it was years ago.

Anyway, one reason--and probably the biggest reason these days--is to setup a dual-boot system, typically Windows and Linux, with one OS on one partition and the other OS on another. Another reason is to keep your OS separate from your data files, or as you mentioned, to keep certain types of data together and apart from other types. This is done just in case one partition becomes corrupted; the other partitions wont be affected and data loss will be minimal. Having a partition just for your OS also gives it reserved space for paging (virtual memory), as well as log files which can potentially change size constantly.

The least used reason for partitioning anymore is drive efficiency. Partitioning can have speed benefits if you plan it properly...Think of a hard drive platter like a vinyl record: the needle has a different speed over the surface of the record depending on where it's at on the record, whether it's towards the edge or towards the center. Hard drives aren't any different, so you can partition to take advantage of these different speeds and thus get data faster (or slower, as the case may be).

If you're worried about your data and whether or not partitioning may have advantages for you, forget about worrying about partitions and just get a couple extra drives. Keeping your OS and data together is kinda sucky, as the most likely thing to crap out on your drive is the OS...And if you lose that, you lose your data if they're together. So put your OS on one drive (has to be your C: drive in general), keep your data on a second drive, and have a back-up drive. If your OS craps out, just re-install from your machine's set-up disks, or restore from the image you took of the drive and carry on. If your data gets lost somehow, just restore it from your back-up drive and carry on. Drives are so cheap these days that there's really no reason not to do this.

If you're into recording, you NEED back-ups anyway, so this shouldn't be a problem to accomplish. If you get dead serious about recording on your computer, you might want to look into setting up a RAID array as well...But that's a different subject, of which Google knows everything about.

can you reset the partition limit?

Yes and no. The standard drive formatting utilities will wipe out your partitions by removing its entry on your drive's table. The data is still technically there, but the OS no longer has a way to find it. So without a special recovery utility, it's as good as gone. It's kinda like being blind and getting kidnapped and dropped off in the middle of nowhere; you're still alive and on Earth, but without knowing where you're at and being able to see reference points, you have no way to get back to where you were.

Having said that though, there are a couple third-party utilities that will theoretically repartition a drive for you without data loss, such as Partition Magic. Lots of people have used Partition Magic successfully, but I personally don't trust it...I "lost" some data using it once years ago and just can't put any faith in it now. That was just my personal experience though, so as always, your mileage may vary. I'm not sure Partition Magic is even still being maintained anyway, so maybe someone else can chime in and give you the low-down on what's current and works well.

Hope this helps.

 

[Chili]

For audio purposes, I doubt partitioning would be beneficial. Wouldn't hurt, but wouldn't help. When you partition, you are splitting one physical drive into 2 or more virtual (or logical) drives. But it's still one physical drive with the same read/write heads, so your audio data will still be competing for read/write access with your other programs, o/s, background services, etc.

Get a 2nd hard drive. Use that strictly for your audio stream. Use the first drive for your O/S and your DAW program and anything else. In your DAW, you can select where you want your audio data saved, choose a folder on the 2nd drive. Then when you're recording, etc, your audio stream will have uninterrupted access to the read/write heads and you can get more tracks, higher sample rate, etc.

 

[CIRO]

Important:a backup HD (I lost 3 HDs for different reasons in the last 4 years, then I think is not a "rare" thing , at least here

Ciro

 

[ThaArtist]

Thanks everyone. Good information! I think I'm gonna just go with a SSD for my OS and programs.... and then keep my disc hdd for data. Good stuff! Thanks!