Partition SATA drives for Mac Pro?

[lamp]

Just ordered 2 320 gig Seagate drives for Mac Pro. Should I partition these into 4, 80 gig sections when formatting? I did this with my old G4 drives and it worked out well.

[Slim Shady]

I wouldn't, however it's just a personal preference. Gone are the days where making smaller partions meant better performance (or in the case of your G4, possibly avoiding 128gb IDE limits), and with file sizes being what they are these days, the larger your volume is the better IMHO. Not to mention, if you were to use any of the partitions simultaneously (like pulling instrument samples off one while running a PT session off another) it would actually hamper your performance. FWIW I use 2 500GB SATA's in my G5 dual, each just with one large volume (465.65GB after format) and it runs like a champ.

[albee1952]

I think SLim is on the right rack. My 2 cents, I would partition in half for "housekeeping".

[lamp]

Not to mention, if you were to use any of the partitions simultaneously (like pulling instrument samples off one while running a PT session off another) it would actually hamper your performance. FWIW I use 2 500GB SATA's in my G5 dual, each just with one large volume (465.65GB after format) and it runs like a champ.

Well my plan was to put sessions on one drive and samples on the 2nd drive. Is this the best way to do it?

Slim do you split sessions and samples on two drives?

I had thought smaller partitions meant shorter seek times.

I see your point on hampered proformance with samples and sessions on seperate partitions on the same drive, the tracking head would have to feed the samples and the audio files simultaneously. But if they were on seperate drives, would there be faster seek times on smaller partitions?

[lamp]

Bump T Bump

[Slim Shady]

Yes, if you can have a 3rd dedicated drive for samples, that's the way to go. I have a dedicated FW800 drive for my Ivory, EastWest and other sample-based VI's data. Some of the smaller ones I let live on my OS drive, like Spectrasonics and things aren't sample based like Lounge Lizard, but pretty much everything else goes on the FW800 drive. As far as seek times, it's not really an issue anymore, drives are so fast, whether it's going over 500gb or 80gb doesn't really make any difference from what I've read, and in all the troubleshooting I do, I've never run into a rig where the problem was a HD that was slow b/c it was too big in size.