partitioning slowing down computer?

  • Thread starter Thread starter faderbug
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faderbug

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i work on a laptop so i'm more or less restricted to the use of one HDD. the way i have it set up is in three partitions, two system partitions (one for all my music software, one for all the rest) and one large 20 gig data partition.
now yesterday a sound engineer told me that working from two partitions, one with the software and one with the data, can actually slow down my computer because the HDD has to work harder working from two different parts of the HDD.


is this correct (seems a bit far fetched to me)
 
The guy doesn't know what he's talking about. The only way it could is if for some reason the software thought you were working from different spindles (HDs) and tried to optimize its access patterns accordingly. The only software I know of that does this (if it's incorrectly configured) is Oracle, and my guess is your laptop isn't running it. ;)
 
Marquis said:
The only software I know of that does this (if it's incorrectly configured) is Oracle, and my guess is your laptop isn't running it. ;)
Click to expand...

you're the oracle man!!! :)
 
A single drive computer with partitions >can< slow down...

It takes a massive amount of time (in computer terms) for the arm of the hard drive to move from one side of the platter to another:

If the arm has to go from one side of the disk to read data, then go all the way to the other side to do Windows housekeeping and then back again to read some more data and back again to do Windows stuff..... can you see where I'm going????

To you that little arm zip back and forth pretty quick but to the system it's taking an ICE AGE to grab all the little chunks that make up your audio file.

Physical movement is 10,000 times slower than electronic access.
 
You're right about seek times being relatively slow but the HD is gonna have to seek a new spot anyway since the audio and software will be in different places even if they are on the same partition, as a matter of fact having unfragmented audio in one spot should reduce the number of jumps, wouldn't it?
 
Possibly, seek time seems to range from 8-15 ms last time I was looking. I imagine those numbers are irreverant of partitions. There's only so much the HD is going to pull back at once, and as far as I know, files are written in little chunks chained together that could be anywhere. My guess is each chunk is a seek.
I suppose ideally you'd want your access to be from the same spot on the drive, but how often when you're running audio is Windows going to be mucking with the other partition anyhow?
 
If you want a serious number of tracks going, it might be more efficient to use an external Firewire drive for audio data, failing that, a USB2.0 one.
A lot of memory would help reduce the amount of time the system accesses a disk - at least with the swap file. 512meg is a good start (assuming XP or Win2000).
 
"A single drive computer with partitions >can< slow down..."

What others have said is correct. You'll end up seeking irrespective of how many partitions you actually have on a single spindle. I could probably invent some strange access patterns in which multiple partitions could cause problems, but these end up being very much like the patterns Oracle would use if it's (mis)configured to think different partitions on a hard drive are individual spindles.

As for external HDs, I would very much recommend against using a USB2.0 device. You will likely get about the same write speeds as Firewire, but slower read speeds and significantly higher CPU utilization (4-5% for IEEE1394 versus 20% or more for USB2.0, dependent on CPU).
 
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