Best partitioning setup for MBP with 2 External Hard Drives?

[jyang]

Hey there,

I run LE (DV Toolkit 2) on a Macbook Pro (2.33ghz, 3GB RAM). I use Pro Tools for Film/TV Post production - so lots of my sessions involve video.

My current setup involves all my sessions being saved/recorded/run off an external eSata 500GB HD (through the expresscard slot), which is partitioned into 2 'drives' - Audio and Video. It works pretty well, but is running out of space so I have bought another 500GB drive.

What I want to have is 1 drive dedicated to AUDIO, and the other drive dedicated to VIDEO. What i'm trying to decide is how to partition the external AUDIO drive to obtain maximum efficiency and track count, as I have a large SFX library as well as lots of samples that will live on the drive as well.

I read in a soundonsound article (actually for PC) that it is good to create a small partition at the start of the drive for current projects - so the HD doesn't need to read the whole drive. This sounds like a good idea but creates a more complex workflow - and I'm not sure whether it is worth it... I was thinking perhaps of trying to setup like this:

EX AUDIO DRIVE
1st Partition - 20GB = for current projects and recordings
2nd Partition - 480GB = for all other audio - including PT sessions, samples, SFX...

EX VIDEO DRIVE
1st Partition - 480GB for all video
2nd Partition - 20GB for audio backup of current project

I'd love some tips or advice about the best partitioning setup for the drives... Or what other people are doing with their setups. And whether it would be good to have a separate partition for all my samples/SFX library.

I also use Ableton Live extensively, and the VSL orchestral instrument. Most of my sampling occurs within Ableton - this may influence the setup.

Thanks for your time and I appreciate any advice.

Cheers,

Jeremy

[jyang]

No-one has anything to say about this?

[M.Brane]

Give it some time. I'm sure someone else will chime in. Hell it hasn't even been a hour yet since your first post.

I don't have any experience with running audio/video/samples simultaneously, but I can tell you that partitioning a drive does little to nothing to improve it's performance. The first partition you create on the drive will be the fastest, but if you're streaming data to/from 2 or more partitions simultaneously you're defeating the whole purpose of partitioning for performance.

Better to put each part of the streaming data on it's own drive, but then you could run into bus bandwidth issues.

[jyang]

Thanks for the reply. It's been 1 day and 1 hour since my post, not just 1 hour! I'm not that impatient...

So even if the samples/SFX are on a separate partition to the 'current project' - the audio files get copied into the session folder anyway - so all the audio in the session would be streaming from 1 partition (the fastest one) - and the video would be streaming from its own drive. That seems like the optimal setup. The bandwidth is pretty high through the expresscard slot, so it wouldn't interfere with the firewire bus at all...

I guess it's whether or not there is much of a difference in performance between the partitioned setup and just having 1 partition per drive - just AUDIO and VIDEO....

cheers.

[M.Brane]

*slaps forehead*

DOH! I didn't even look at the date.

That's the way I would do it: audio on one drive, and video on the other making sure to keep both drives at 50% free-space minimum. Should be fine that way I would think, but like I said I've never done anything besides audio files.

Backing up the files, and initializing the working drives on a regular basis should keep 'em nice 'n healthy, and prevent catastrophic data loss/performance issues due to fragmentation.