Should I Partition

[mman00]

Hi.

Should I partition a 500 gig external firewire drive? I plan to run sessions from it.

Thanks

[JNS]

Or a 500G internal SATA drive for that matter?

Jeff

[relaxo]

No, 500GB is a small drive these days anyways.

Also, partitioning is a great danger if you run a public DAW where people may not know what's going on. they may back up their project onto the other partition, which is not backed up at all.

Lastly, partitioning is a less efficient use of available space.

Portioning is old skool and was often over-utilized and dumb in the olden days anyways. There are still uses for it, but for the average Joe, no.

[mman00]

Thanks for the reply.

On a side note, is it alright if the first external firewire drive is connected to the Mac's FW400 port, and a second external firewire drive is chained off the FW800 port of the first drive?

Thanks.

[drenkrom]

I'm with relaxo all the way. There is no real need to partition a 500G drive unless you can think of a really good one for your particular use.

As for the drive chaining, the scenario you describe works well. I have a few drives chained that way here and have never had any trouble. Even if you were plugging the FW800 drive directly in the computer, it would not run faster, as that buss drops to 400mbps the moment a FW400 device is plugged into any port on the computer.

[mman00]

Thanks for the info, and glad to hear you have FW400 and FW800 successfully chained off the computer's FW400 port.

I came across this on the Digi support pages. It states:

"FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 drives should not be combined"

Here's the link

Is anyone else successfully working this way?

Thanks.

[zodo]

It works fine for me using an Oxford 924 drive and Oxford 911 drive combination, but it definitely drops both drives down to 400 speed. I suppose that it's conceivably possible that you could have problems using other chipsets...but then again Digi doesn't recommend those anyhow. Worst case, your performance will suffer. It's not going to nuke your sessions or anything.

[jeremyroberts]

It's not that FW400 and FW800 should not be combined: the FW bus will dumb down to the slowest device in the chain -- so if you have any FW800 devices with FW400, you will eliminate any throughput benefit of the 800.