Partition Question

[Eless]

So I know that partitioning your system drive for use as an audio drive is bad news. But my question is this:
I am currently building a PC and considered and 80 GB system drive, and a 1 TB everything-else drive. I was going to partition this up, and have one about 120 GB for an audio drive (i don't need more, all inactive sessions get moved to external storage.) Is this going to cause a problem?

Is the problem just partitioning a system drive, or using any partition of any drive for an audio drive?

Cory

PS i hope this wasn't too confusing...

[Eless]

to clear it up.. the partitions were in reference to the 1 TB drive. The 80 GB would stay fully intact and strictly a system drive.

[TOM@METRO]

You can safely partition your non-system drive. You can also partition your system drive as long as it is not used for sessions and PT is installed on c:.

[Eless]

you never fail to provide a quick, insightful response. thank you very much.

[spkguitar]

To clarify; the problem does not come from partitioning.

The problem comes from accessing the same physical disk drive at the same time as you are trying to stream audio from it for Pro Tools. The operating system routinely accesses the hard drive for all kinds of tasks, and this is the problem of using a partition on your system drive for your Pro Tools sessions.

Likewise, if you partition that huge drive like you are saying, and something needs to access one of those partitions while you are streaming audio for Pro Tools, you may still/also have problems.

[TOM@METRO]

Originally Posted by spkguitar

To clarify; the problem does not come from partitioning.

The problem comes from accessing the same physical disk drive at the same time as you are trying to stream audio from it for Pro Tools. The operating system routinely accesses the hard drive for all kinds of tasks, and this is the problem of using a partition on your system drive for your Pro Tools sessions.

Likewise, if you partition that huge drive like you are saying, and something needs to access one of those partitions while you are streaming audio for Pro Tools, you may still/also have problems.

All true... For example you wouldn't ideally want to stream samples from the same physical drive you are running sessions on, but for storage or things running only while PT is not up, you will be OK.

[Socrates]

I normally try and keep the page dataset and system drive on one physical drive, and nothing else--windows requires a page dataset even if you have more ram than it can address. I created a small partititon for the page dataset because I don't want to back it up when I back up the system drive.

Whether the 1tb drive is fast enough for the rest of the files is something that can be measured, but its kind of hard to speculate. I am at a loss right now as far as recommending some freeware that can measure drive busyness to see if its a bottleneck.

I have a 1.5 tb for my D drive, and all is well, but my projects are very small, so that doesn't prove anything.

Problem with the larger drives is that the storage density of the platters increases faster than the speed of the arms does, so a really large drive isn't as fast as two smaller ones (hence raid).

Logical partitioning has no performace impact, the performance is determined by the arm and disk rotational speed and the storage density--as shared by all logical drives on the disk. I use partitioning as an administrative tool to help keep things organized--especially for backup and recovery purposes.

Try it and see how it goes-what you are proposing could be just the ticket.