Advice on HD partitioning?

[D Pinder]

QUOTED FROM ANOTHER FORUM: http://www.digidesign.com/ubb/Forum2/HTML/002948.html

generator
posted March 03, 2000 05:46 PM ÊÊÊ ÊÊÊÊ ÊÊ
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I was told that you shouldn't keep using the same drive for more than 16 tracks, whether it's partitioned or not! I found out the hard way, and had to replace 2 drives, which were constantly strained to play back/record 24-32 tracks. (These were 9 and 18GB Cheetah drives, both partitioned). Now we raid between 2 separate drives, w/ no problems.
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Is it possible, as Generator suggests, that he WORE OUT his drives due to high track counts?

Oddly enough, another Digi tech support person somewhere else, recommended 9 GB partitions, so there seems to be a little disparity here on the official party line statement...

[This message has been edited by D Pinder (edited March 08, 2000).]

[Steve Rosenthal]

There isn't any offical Digi party line on partitioning.

It all depends on your own personal needs. Partitioning can improve seek times by limiting the distance the heads have to travel to complete a particular command.

Most of today's drives (especially the 10k RPM models) don't require partitioning, and will perform very well as whole volumes. However, if you do multitrack work, say with drums for example, where you're editing every hit and crossfading in and out of each hit, you're putting a huge seek load on a drive. So, given a 9GB drive that's unpartitioned, and a 9GB drive that's partitioned into two 4GB volumes, a 4GB partition give better seek performance on the mondo drum edits than the unpartitioned 9GB drive. Why? Because the heads don't have to travel as far to read the data.

If you do long duration passes where you need maximum contiguous drive space, then partitioning will obviously limit you.

You don't need to partition your drives, but depending on your performance requirements, it can be helpful.

The one major caveat about the performance gains of partitioning is this: Only record or play back from one partition at a time. If you record to or play back from two (or more) partitions on the same drive, you're making the heads travel a greater distance, thus negating any gains.

The bottom line is: Think about what your workflow requires. If you need to maximize your seek performance and you can live within the space constraints of a partition that's smaller than your total drive capacity, then consider partitioning. If not, don't.

I hope this sheds a little light on the matter.



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--Steve Rosenthal, Digidesign ETS

[Will Russell]

Thanks for the clarification!

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Will Russell
Electric Wilburland Studio
http://www.wilburland.com