To partition or not?

[Don Corleone]

Howdy, maybe someone can help?
I want to install OS X & 9.2.2 in my system with PTLE. But i'm not sure about how many partitions I should do on my drives and how I could optimize my system with this setup:
a G4/400 AGP that came with a 10Gb/7200 drive that I've re-installed under the dvd-rom drive and 2 other internal ATA100 60Gb-7200rpm maxtor drives installed on the bottom chassis(1master,1slave).

I was thinking to simply partition the 60Gb Master into 2 partitions as the boot system 1 for osX &1 for os9.2.2 with the rest of the space for audio files and use the other 2 drives for audio files also...
Would that be effecient? or I should do more partitions...?

Thanks!

[img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[Don Corleone]

Thx for your inputs!
I'll try your tip about partitioning. I thought osX "needed" to be in different disk partitions for some reason.
But there one 'lil thing that bug me about your setup. After searching on the net for more info on this I found this interesting thread at www.xlr8yourmac.com-http://bbs.xlr8yourmac.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/000163.html discussing about bus speed issue. I don't know if you considered this but according to these folks the cd/dvd-rom&zip tray is using a slower bus speed...
ATAPI Bus is Ultra ATA (3) CD/DVD bus-16.6MB/sec max data transfer and the bottom tray has an Ultra ATA66 bus-66MB/sec max data transfer.
If it's the case and I install my 60Gb disk in there, wouldn't I under use the bandwidth transfer capacity of this ATA100/60Gb drive?(when it could go up to the 66Mhz I believe, if it was in the bottom tray). Specialy when the read/write speed is crucial in audio recording/playback.
So anyway I found another alternative that I haven't thought of and would even maximize the output of my 2 ATA/100 drives for cheap: a Tempo ATA100 PCI Card by Sonnet-. Seem to me to be a viable solution, I would gain 1 more drive space(ATA/66) and would be able to use the full power of these 2 disks at ATA/100. I guess a 2nd fan wouldn't hurt too.
could this work?

[img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[where02190]

Move the 10gb to the bottom tray and make your master ATA bus 0. Use for system folder and applications, should be more than enough. Do not record audio to this drive. No need to partition, OSX and OS9 will be fine on the same drive and partition. (We've been running that way for over a year now.)

Use the other two drives as ATA bus 0 and 1 slaves and use for audio. You can partition, but if you move alot of audio and need to defrag often it's simpler to just back-up the files and reinitialize, but of course that means you need to rebuild your partitions also.

Partitioning speeds up seek times for the OS, since it has a smaller portion of the disc to look in. We have 2-40gb drives installed as audio drives with no partitions and don't have any problems with seek times. I suspect you would not notice any difference if you partitioned, and too many partitions can actually lose you usable space.

Hope this is helpful.

[where02190]

We use the slave drive on ATA bus 1 for recording all the time, and never noticed and issues. Our mac is a G-4 dual 800 FYI.