2nd hard drive - partition ?

[Pretender]

I am adding an 80 gig hard drive as drive D

Would it be wise to partition 10-20 gig as D (closest to the center) for recording/projects in progress to boost hard drive performance, and ensure I always have an unfragmented space to record, while leaving the balance of the 80 gig for storage?

-OR-

Is this more trouble than it's worth

Let's hear your opinions/experiences

[Bastiaan]

Maybe that makes sense when you want to play back 32 tracks of audio. But then still. I have ptle 6.1, and never ever got a message about slow discs. Not even when i only had one disc in the system. So i would say "not worth the trouble", unless you get "drive too slow" messages.

[Stone Knife]

More trouble than it's worth.

Way better to make sure you get a fast 7200 RPM drive and with an 8 MEG cache than configuring how you partition it. Have DMA enabled on your ATA bus and get 512 MEGS of ram in your machine and you'll have done things what will make a concrete difference in your performance.

With this exception:

If you wanted to create a partition of say, 2 gigs and dedicate that partition as your page file, and set that page file to the same minimum and maximum size, like as 3x your RAM size, then you'd be gaining the advantage of being able to defrag ALL of your system drive without the page file getting in the way, and the speed advantage of the system drive not having to write to itself and resizing the page file while performing read functions in carrying out application instructions, (same concept as having a separate write drive for audio). In that case yes, a separate partition for that purpose would be very worthwhile.



PS not related to this topic: I really dislike these new 'smileys'. Idiotic things. Too bad.