partition hard drive

[slicvic1]

i just got a 250 gig lacie hard drive that i want to use mainly for pro tools and maybe later on use for videos, my question is should i partition it into more then 1 drive(if so how many?) or will it be fine as just 1 drive?

[JamesV]

I've partitioned my 160gb audio without issue, however I've heard there might be a loss in performance. Have not noticed a difference.

[mkosacek]

partitioning of a single drive is really nothing more than organization of your files. Can you handle folders or do you want separate drive letters (or mounts, etc)? From a performance standpoint, its still a single spindle. Unless you are doing video and audio simultaneously (and if you are you should invest in another drive) you should not see a performance hit. also, don't try to split a PT session across 2 partitions of the same physical drive, that will just make the head seek back and forth more often and further, causing slower disk reponse time (higher latency!). You will probably see decreased performance vs. a single partition.

[albee1952]

Good advice above. I would partition the drive in half for "housekeeping". This allows you to move files from one "drive" to the other so you can defrag or reformat either partition. I split a 160 to 2x80gig and its been fine.

[spkguitar]

I think Digi actually recomends partitioning larger drives: previous thread

You should consider partitioning that 240 gig drive into 3 80 gig volumes. You'll probably see better disk performance as it cuts down (by 66%) on the disk space Pro Tools has to look at when searching for files to playback.