Partitioning a Hard drive

[Marty McFly]

Hey
Just got a Lacie porsche 250 gb external hard drive just wondering exactly the steps I need to take to partition the drive? How big should I make the partitions and does one act as a buffer? if so how do i do so? i'm pretty new at this whole thing so any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanx
Marty

[Ged Lineham]

You don't actually say exactly what you intend to be doing with your partitioned hard drives.... why would you want it partitioned? Best results usually come from this set-up, system, pro-tools and any other audio software load on to system drive and record to external drive. best o luck

[Marty McFly]

I heard that it was a good idea to partition your dirve and have one partition act as a sort of buffer. I wasn't too sure of all this seeing as I'm not that computer savy. Any suggestions or should I just format my drive with one partition? I want to do what is most efficient.

[M.Brane]

With modern hard drives the only real reason for partitioning is for orgnanizational purposes. The first partition you create will be on the outer edge of the platters though, and will be slightly faster than the inner depending on the drive.

[grindx]

Didn't partitioning also cut the area of a drive that a session wrote audio to? Weren't the drives able to read and write audio more quickly because they did not have to try to read and write across greater distances?

[M.Brane]

Yes that that's true. I usually partition my drives so that the first partition is for working (faster), and the second is for storage (usually a backup for stuff on another drive).

With the performance of modern drives the difference will be slight, but every little bit helps.