Partition size for Panther

[slideguitarguy]

I read on the DUC that Panther needs to be installed on a large partition, 30 or 40 GB, I have 3 drives with lots of partitions and it is installed on a 10 GB partition.
Is the partition recommended to be large so all the Panther apps can live on the same partition?
Does Panther prefer this?
Is it better to have PT and other Panther apps on the same partition?
I still have Reason back on my Jaguar partition, should I get rid of Jaguar?

Thanks
(my earlier post today about PT not finding Reason with Panther got no replies yet, so this is the second half of my post)

[Infa]

If you have dedicated drives JUST FOR your audio.. I wouldn't even partition my OS drive.. I know, I know, they recommend it, but so far it's been 6 years for me of flawless recording, no problems, no nothing. No crashes, no freezes, everything always worked cool for me. And I have (what sounds to be from you) the same set up.(except I run HD).. I have 3 drives. 1 is the OS/Boot up drive that came with the computer (60gig), it is NOT partitioned, and ALL it is used for is my OS and ALL of my Applications/Programs, and Text, and graphic DOCUMENTS..... That's it --- Now I got 2 other drives (internal SCSI) 80gig SeaGate Cheetah drives, and they are ONLY used for Pro Tools sessions, and all it audio files, fade files(of coarse), and mixes, etc..
Those also I NEVER partitioned... Everything works fine, and always has...

I really don't buy into this partitioning crap... I tried it once, and never noticed a difference, so the next time I upgraded, and got all new stuff, I went back to just formatting them normally............ 100% stable and effiecent...........

Hope this helps

[JFreak]

10GB partition for panther is just about optimal size - just move your /Users folder to another partition and leave system be alone in its partition. that way your system keeps running as fast as possible. but given that modern software nowadays has grown in size, you might want to make your system partition a bit larger (12-15GB) to make reserve for some apps, too.

the benefit of partitioning is vastly reduced seek times, which leads to faster disk access and because hard drive is always a bottleneck, making it faster speeds the whole system up overall. another benefit is that should you need to re-install your operating system, you don't need to worry about moving your files back and forth - you just wipe the system drive clean and install it again. (this of course assumes that you have moved your /Users elsewhere, too. you can do it by modifying /etc/fstab file...)

[Infa]

Yeah, I tried that JFreak, at one point in my life, and I swear I didn't notice any "vastly reduced seek times"....
Are you sure you notice them too, or are you just thinking so because they told us to do it that way ??
And if you DO partition your OS drive,,,, what the heck do you use the other 40-50 gigs on the drive for ??
Just documents and graphic files and stuff ?? Or can you put your applications over there as well, or do your applications need to be on the SAME partition as the drive??

When I did it, I just had everything on that partition (OS, Apps, Docs,etc..) it seemed like a waste of time to me. But maybe I wasn't doing something right, or wasn't looking for the right results.......

[JFreak]

in theory, if you re-zero your hard disk and make one large partition in it, and install operating system to a clean drive, you MIGHT be lucky and have all your operating system files in the fastest area of the disk, so in the beginning you MIGHT have full disk performance at hand. that's not certain, though, but what is 100% sure is this: over time, because of adding and deleting files, upgrading system and using swap files, your system files will begin to move to other places in the partition - and if your partition fills the whole disk, then you will find that your system files can be anywhere. sure, this takes time, few months to a year depending on how heavily you use the system, but it is a sure thing that the disk performance will degrade over time. severely.

now compare that degraded performance (which would be the "real-world" example, as most computers are at least half a year old) to making a small partition (about 12GB) to the beginning of the disk, installing your system there, and moving /Users folder to another larger partition. difference is huge. you install your operating system to dedicated system partition, install your apps there, do your upgrades when you have to, but notice this: if you have moved your /Users folder to another partition, all system preferences, caches, documents, etc. are located in different partition than the system - and if you don't install/remove tons of apps, there shouldn't be much changes to the system partition, only swap file(s) move from place to place, but that's a minor issue. with this kind of a system you can have years of top performance, meaning your system keeps performing as it were just installed.

you don't see the point?

another benefit of moving /Users away from the system partition would be the ease of re-installing should you have need to. just wipe & install and modify the /etc/fstab file - and you have everything set up.

---

in theory it would also be beneficial to move swap file to its own dedicated partition, but in my opinion it is a very minor issue. nowadays there is plenty of ram available and the swap file can be turned off if one wants to. the point of all this partitioning is to force certain files to be in certain locations of the disk, and to separate system files (that change very little) from user files (that change constantly). in this perspective you applications would also count as system files, but no-one says you couldn't make a dedicated partition for them, too. it's just that every additional partition "wastes" some space, because you have to decide (and over-estimate!) how much space you want to allocate for each purpose - and having top performance each partition should have at least about 15% free space in addition to that over-estimated usage.

my own powerbook has an internal 7200rpm hitachi 60GB drive, which is partitioned 15GB system, 25GB users, 15GB shared. i use mount points /Users and /Users/Shared respectively, and have found that the disk performance has never been this good. if you wonder why i have separate shared partition, well, that's where i keep my itunes library and i want to keep that in the slowest part of the hard disk.

[Infa]

Gotcha ,, makes sense, as I have heard that before too.. But you have described it alot better than I have ever understood it.
I just am wondering why I never noticed THAT much of a difference... I mean how big is big, when you say "it's a big difference" of seek time... 'Cause my system seems to operate pretty dang awesome,, and its already pretty old (2 years), and I use it like a work horse.. (Music, graphics, Film) Music Professionally,, ... Graphics and Film just growing halfway paid hobbies.....

[JFreak]

well, i don't know for sure... but i'd guess that you have a slow hard drive interface (ide66?) and although your disk performance has been degrading, it still outperforms the speed of your interface - that would however be an educated guess. has the hard drive been keeping more noise (seeking) than before? that would indicate that the files are fragmented, but if the throughput still outperforms the bottleneck (interface), you will not be able to notice the slowdown.

i have an ata100 interface and drive in this 1.25GHz albook and i can surely notice the difference between fragmented and top-performing drive.

[where02190]

We partition our system drive into three partitions, one for OS'9.2.2(5gb), one for OSX Panther(10gb), the remaining 105gb is for backup. We have two additional intenral drives, also 120gb (all IBM?Hitachi 8mb cache with very low seek times, and also ultra quiet) for audio and add'l backup that are not paritioned. the computer is a dual 1Ghz G-4 quicksilver, 1.5gb RAM and an 001. We are able in either OS to get 32/8 Davec scores, and have had no issues whatsoever with speed, the computer is always waiting for us, not the other way around.

Prior to isntalling the 120gb for system drive, we had OS9 and OSX panther residing on the same drive with no partitions iwht absolutely no problems and the same Davec score.

With the low seek times of todays very fast IDE drives, partitioning is really not necessary on a Mac.

[slideguitarguy]

Infa posed a great question:

And if you DO partition your OS drive,,,, what the heck do you use the other 40-50 gigs on the drive for ??
Just documents and graphic files and stuff ?? Or can you put your applications over there as well, or do your applications need to be on the SAME partition as the drive??

I have been trying to get a clear answer to this, anybody else?
Obviously other partitions on this boot drive can be used for backup audio data, but here is the big question:
Does Panther/PT run better if all apps are on the same partition with the OS?

[slideguitarguy]

JFreak sez:

now compare that degraded performance (which would be the "real-world" example, as most computers are at least half a year old) to making a small partition (about 12GB) to the beginning of the disk, installing your system there, and moving /Users folder to another larger partition. difference is huge. you install your operating system to dedicated system partition, install your apps there, do your upgrades when you have to, but notice this: if you have moved your /Users folder to another partition, all system preferences, caches, documents, etc. are located in different partition than the system - and if you don't install/remove tons of apps, there shouldn't be much changes to the system partition, only swap file(s) move from place to place, but that's a minor issue. with this kind of a system you can have years of top performance, meaning your system keeps performing as it were just installed.

another benefit of moving /Users away from the system partition would be the ease of re-installing should you have need to. just wipe & install and modify the /etc/fstab file - and you have everything set up.

my own powerbook has an internal 7200rpm hitachi 60GB drive, which is partitioned 15GB system, 25GB users, 15GB shared. i use mount points /Users and /Users/Shared respectively, and have found that the disk performance has never been this good. if you wonder why i have separate shared partition, well, that's where i keep my itunes library and i want to keep that in the slowest part of the hard disk.

This is great stuff.
Wouldn't it be great if Digi would jump in here to comment?

I have always partitioned mainly for ease of wiping clean and defragging.
The concept of moving the /Users and /Users/Shared to another partition is new to me, but then so is Panther itself. Is this as easy as it sounds?