Partition on Audio drive

[India001]

I have a 40 GB audio drive.Should I partition it into two 20 GB each or should keep it as one.This drive will be used as audio drive only.
Thanks for your inputs.

[Canteenboy]

As long as this drive is for Audio only and you're using WIN98SE, there is no reason I can see why you would want to partition it. My vote is to keep your drives in as simple of configuration as possible.

[jsmooth226]

it is my understanding that windows operating system scans the entire drive to access file info ...if that is the case it would seem that two smaller drive partitions would allow for faster access times......

just my 2 cents.....peace

[digi2000]

I was on the phone with DIGI a few weeks ago and they recomended partitioning my 20GB Drive into 4 partitions. By seperating the drives into smaller partitions, the read head on the drive does'nt have to search as much and is runs much better. I would recomend smaller partitions.

[QuikDraw]

Smaller partitions also defrag MUCH faster than larger ones. Two 20Gb partitions will defrag much faster than one 40Gb partition. You'll defrag both 20Gb partitions in half the time it would take to defrag the single 40Gb partition.

I don't like to go smaller than 20Gb per partition. I like to keep all the sessions for a project on the same partition, and for me, one 10 to 12 song CD project fits nicely on a 20Gb partition with room to do the bouncing to disk when they're finished.

Mike

[India001]

Thanks for your inputs.

[jsmooth226]

i don't think the idea was to record material to different partitions at the same time,,,,but to create two partitions to have better access time........

[Digi Engineering]

I recommend not partitioning large drives. In PTLE/Win, you may actually get worse performance if a session's audio spans multiple partitions of the same physical drive than if the same audio were all located in the same large partition. I believe this is different than in the Mac version, which is probably why the Digidesign Tech Support person advised you as they did.

Eric Day
Digidesign

[GuitarEasley]

It doesn't take my computer long at all to defrag its 40 gigabyte hard drive...

...what takes me a long time is the 'Scan Disk' for possible errors. I always hear and read you should do a thorough 'Scan Disk' procedure right before defragmenting. If it were'nt for that I'd defragment all the time.

Anybody here ever just defragment
without 'scanning'?

I am curious why it comes so highly recomended to 'scan before 'defragging'?

Thanks,

GuitarEasley

[Stone Knife]

As your drive is write only, aside from allowing smaller cluster sizes, I don't see much to recommend partitioning your 40.
If you do a 25-75 split, it could give you a place to 'park' data when/if you wanted to reformat the 75% partition for housecleaning.
I defrag w/o scandisk probably 3 out of 4 times...