Partition size for Panther

[slideguitarguy]

where02190 sez:

We partition our system drive into three partitions, one for OS'9.2.2(5gb), one for OSX Panther(10gb), the remaining 105gb is for backup. We have two additional intenral drives, also 120gb (all IBM?Hitachi 8mb cache with very low seek times, and also ultra quiet) for audio and add'l backup that are not paritioned. the computer is a dual 1Ghz G-4 quicksilver, 1.5gb RAM and an 001. We are able in either OS to get 32/8 Davec scores, and have had no issues whatsoever with speed, the computer is always waiting for us, not the other way around.

Prior to isntalling the 120gb for system drive, we had OS9 and OSX panther residing on the same drive with no partitions iwht absolutely no problems and the same Davec score.

With the low seek times of todays very fast IDE drives, partitioning is really not necessary on a Mac.

So you are actually saying partitioning can be useful for the boot drive, but not the audio drives?
What about when you get a bad sector in a drive (happened to me recently), if the drive is partitioned you only lose the data on the bad partition.
Then you can zero-out that partition and reuse it (bad sectors will be locked out).
Also it makes searching for missing audio files easier.

[where02190]

Keeps apps with the OS.

We've seen no performance increase by partitioning.

[JFreak]

We've seen no performance increase by partitioning.

it might be so with your desktop systems, but i can tell you that laptops still benefit greatly from partitioning. those 2.5" drives are not too speedy, but having installed a 7200rpm hitachi and partitioning it correctly, i can achieve true desktop speed with this laptop workstation of mine...

it doesn't hurt to optimize desktops, either. disks fragment over time, you know...

[JFreak]

I have always partitioned mainly for ease of wiping clean and defragging.
The concept of moving the /Users and /Users/Shared to another partition is new to me, but then so is Panther itself. Is this as easy as it sounds?

yes, it actually is. all you have to do is enable root account, edit /etc/fstab file and reboot. i have given instructions twice on this forum, so search it up and good luck...

[where02190]

it might be so with your desktop systems, but i can tell you that laptops still benefit greatly from partitioning. those 2.5" drives are not too speedy, but having installed a 7200rpm hitachi and partitioning it correctly, i can achieve true desktop speed with this laptop workstation of mine...

it doesn't hurt to optimize desktops, either. disks fragment over time, you know...

Quite true, large, slower drives, such as those in laptops can definitely benefit from partitioning.

As far as defraging, we use Copyagent (for OS9) and CarbonCopyCloner(OSX) to backup our system drive, then simply reinitianlize and restore. we've found this to be the most effective and efficient way to defrag on the Mac.

[Leo Garcia]

Now I got 2 other drives (internal SCSI) 80gig SeaGate Cheetah drives, and they are ONLY used for Pro Tools sessions, and all it audio files, fade files(of coarse), and mixes, etc..
Those also I NEVER partitioned... Everything works fine, and always has...

I really don't buy into this partitioning crap... I tried it once, and never noticed a difference, so the next time I upgraded, and got all new stuff, I went back to just formatting them normally............ 100% stable and effiecent...........

Hope this helps

JFreak, Infa has SCSI Internal hard drives for audio storage, and you've been explaining about IDE hard drives; the technologies and the data busses are different... think that SCSI HD have been used in Protools and the older Macintosh for several years, and when the IDE HD technology got better (the last few years), Apple has moved to them in their configurations... but SCSI drives are more reliable for audio and video (IDE drives are used for home and project studios)

[J-P-78]

Im thinking of getting rid of my 10 Gb drive with jaguar, and getting a 7200rpm 80 Gb drive with a 15 Gb partition for Panther.

However, I heard you should always record to a fast drive (7200rpm) but I also heard that it is smart to keep your system on a slower drive. Personally I dont think that would make a diference.
Isn´t it so that faster is always better regarding harddrives.
Anyone have any comment on that?

[Infa]

Im thinking of getting rid of my 10 Gb drive with jaguar, and getting a 7200rpm 80 Gb drive with a 15 Gb partition for Panther.

However, I heard you should always record to a fast drive (7200rpm) but I also heard that it is smart to keep your system on a slower drive. Personally I dont think that would make a diference.
Isn´t it so that faster is always better regarding harddrives.
Anyone have any comment on that?

I have never heard of "getting a slower drive" would help performance on ANYTHING,, let alone a OS system drive. And now a days 7200 is kinda slow anyway... they have 10000rpm ones now..

And I think it would be a good thing to buy that drive. And it will work just fine...

The person that told you that maybe MEANT, it would be useless to get a faster drive because the system/application/whatever don't even read data that fast... Which (only sometimes) is true... BUT IT COULDN'T HURT IT in any way, or be at any less of a performance to use a drive that is faster than you need....