set up harddrives and partitions for best performance

[chucknorriz]

Hi,
i wanna know how i get the best performance for live: One harddrive with the Ableton-Prog and all the data which are used in sets on one partition. Seperate Partitions for data and prog. or one harddrive each. my system recently suffered from many crashe due to too slow harddrive... (and ram). anyway i want to upgrade my entire pc/workstation (CPU, RAM, MB, HD) and wonder how many hd i should get?
thx

[davepermen]

if you have one harddrive, just use one partition. separate partitions create borders between the different parts. that result in a forced needle jump when ever you want to cross the border (so system accesses some system file on c: and you want some data on d: => jumping around all the time.

if you have one partition, the defragmentation tool of choice (since vista, the system does automatic background defragmentation when idle (once a week i think)) can collect data together (so ableton system files + ableton project files could be stored near so not much big needle jumps will be needed).

if you have more than one drive, putting stuff on different disks allows it to access them 100% in parallel => help you. in a laptop, you can get similar gains from using an ssd. they allow random accesses and multiple in parallel, too.