How should you divide your data & programs?

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Mongoo

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Hi I've heard a bit about partitioning your hardrive and stuff to seperate the systems stuff from your data. Not that I know but I'm guessing this is suppose to clause less conflict between the two.

I just got a brand new 120gig hardrive in addition to the 30 gig one I already have. The 120gig is from all I can tell pretty tip top shape, like its rpm is 7200 and stuff. Its buffer is only 2mb instead of 4 or what ever else they offer but the guy told me it would be fine for audio.

My question is, How should I divide up my programs? Should I have audio programs on my 120gig drive and record files to the 120gig drive? or have the programs on the 30gig drive and record on the 120gig? I've got windows 98se on the 30gig.

Thanks.
 
the way ive just done it...

partition 1: OS, and other programs
Partition 2: Music software only
2nd HDD: Just for music data...
 
From what I've heard, 120 GB have a long seek time and are not good for quick access like you need in audio. I'd try to find the seek time on your hard drive... if it's less then 12ms you should be fine... your 30 is probably around 9.8ms though. Beyond that, the only real point I can see to using multiple partitions is if you are running something that's unstable enough that it can potentially corrupt a whole drive and you want to seperate this "data hazard" from the rest of your stuff. I've heard some people say that it makes your drive run faster, which may end up being true on the 120GB but I'm not sure. Anyway, just my 2 cents.

Tharin
 
I have a 40 gig and a 60 gig. I have two copies of winxp, one on each drive, it's a dual boot. So i only installed audio programs on the 60 gig, and put everythign else on the 40. I mean nothing else on the audio drive, just basic drivers and audio programs. Every program you installed increases the risk of incompatability problems, and reduces the performace a little bit, things get a little more clustered. If you have only one copy of an operating system on a drive, and you installed programs to that OS, but lets say another drive, the same problem remains, it doesn't help any. It just means the OS on drive X has to access programs to run from drive Y, instead of just getting them directly from X, which it is running off. So that isn't really very usefull. Only if they are seperate installs of an OS, in a dual boot setup.
 
I don't see any reason for partitioning your drive, unless you only have one drive and still want to keep data seperately from OS whitch is good.
With two partitions and a dual boot you end up with one partition with audio, and one without. The basic of both are the same. The partition with audio (most important I think) is most sensitive for possible problems because of the drivers plugins etc. that are needed for it's special task. So when you screw up this partition you're left with your, useless for audio, basic partition. Unless of course both partitions are equally important.

Have a great day
Henry
 
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I have a 6 gig "boot" drive that has my OS and Acid Pro 4.0 on it. I keep my recording applications on the same physical drive that my OS is on. The "data" I keep on my 20 gig drive which is a slave on the 1st IDE channel. This combination works for me. I will shortly re-image my machine and it will totally be dedicated for just recording.
 
One small disk for OS and applications
One small disk for temp files and the data you are working on
One big disk for the data you are not exactly working on, but might need any day
One big disk for backup of the first big disk.

That's my preference. You can skip the second small disk and use partitions on the first small disk.
 
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