VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[Bruce]

Much of this past week has been dedicated to figuring out how to replace the main hard drive on my main computer. It's a five year old Power Mac G5 and I'm sure my audio software program has put lots of wear and tear on the original. I finally found a British computer firm that has clear as a bell instructions on how to clone a copy with Carbon Copy Cloner software and then switch over. Then I spent time selecting a good replacement drive. I chose a WD Caviar Black...the personal and professional reviews I read seemed better for it than the Seagate Barracuda for example. The current drive is a Maxtor which is now part of Seagate.

Here's my question or thought for discussion: I'm only using 100 GB of my current 160 GB drive, but the smallest my local supplier had was a 1TB (1,000 G drive! Now I've got to decide if I want to partition the new one into two virtual drives and use the other drive for something else. I'm guessing I don't want to put any "actively used" material on the second drive because it would be a bit of a strain to run an application from one partition and have it deal with data on the other partition....sound reasonable? I'm thinking I should just devote the second partition to storage of files. Your thoughts are welcome.

I also understand you can make a partition flexible in size. Any words of wisdom on making these both flexible so they can be as big as they wanna be?

Many thanks,

B
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VO-BB Member #31 Enlisted June, 2005

I'm not a Zoo, but over the years I've played one on radio/TV. .

[bobsouer]

Bruce,

Why not just leave the drive as a single partition and just put things you want to "store" in sub-folders on that drive?
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Be well,
Bob Souer (just think of lemons)
The second nicest guy in voiceover.
+1-724-613-2749
Source Connect, phone patch, pony express

[Mike Sommer]

Partitioning is nice, and as I'm sure you know you must put you OS on the first partition. So the first partition must be large enough to contain your OS and all your applications.

Next I think a Terabit is a little to big for the main Hard Drive, for storage it's great, but for the main hard drive I would not go much larger than 500 GB. This hard drive is where I would keep of course my OS, applications, and the general accumulative crud of daily computer life. Then I would have a second onboard Hard Drive for storage and my working files -this is where 1TB is really nice; even with that 500 GB is all you should need onboard, unless you are editing video.

The computer will run much faster and more efficiently if you configure it this way, and will extend the life of you hard drives.

With two "on board" hard drives, one is searching for information to operate the OS and application, and the second hard drive is searching and writing the information for the file, instead of one hard drive doing all the heavy lifting. Having a single really large hard drive as a main drive is inefficient, because it has to search through that much more curd to find what it needs. Remember how fast your computer was when it was new and there was nothing on it?

Partitioning is nice, it will help keep thing neat and tidy, but you must be diligent to keep it that way.

Also it's a good idea to install your OS on all your hard drives so you can boot up from any drive in case of a melt down.
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Acoustics are counter-intuitive. If one thing is certain about acoustics, it is that if anything seems obvious it is probably wrong.

[Bruce]

Yeah, I was concerned about size, first from the standpoint of wasted space when my needs are for one tenth of a TB...that's why I thought partitioning would limit the amount of searching that would have to be done. But I don't know if that's the way hard drives really work...when you format it into let's say a 30% partition and a 70% partition and you're only using the 30% "drive", does it just look at 30% of the disc or is that 30% scattered all over the disc? And this is a Mac that doesn't offer you the choice of moving all your files into a tighter configuration like I remember PC's used to do. Macs kind of do it automatically.

And as far as disc size, new full sized Macs come with a choice of 640 GB or 1 TB drives for the main drive so they seem to think that size doesn't matter. I think I'll just install it as is for the moment and if it's sluggish try and find a smaller drive, but the smallest Caviar Black is 500 GB, and it's hard to find anything decent below 300 GB these days.

Hey, I still remember when a 10 Megabyte drive was a big deal!

Hey, I'd tell you I remember having to boot up using a 5½" floppy disc, but that'd date me so I won't.

B
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VO-BB Member #31 Enlisted June, 2005

I'm not a Zoo, but over the years I've played one on radio/TV. .

[bobsouer]

Bruce,

Wasn't it 5 1/4" floppy?
_________________
Be well,
Bob Souer (just think of lemons)
The second nicest guy in voiceover.
+1-724-613-2749
Source Connect, phone patch, pony express

[Bruce]