HD PARTITIONING

Needs2Know · Post by **Needs2Know** » Fri Jun 16, 2006 11:04 pm

Whats the best way to partition a HD? I've always partitioned my HD in two peices, one for the OS and programs, and the other for music files I dont want to loose.

But then I was thinking, what if I partitioned a section for PTs, and a section for LIVE, and a section for audio files? Lets say that you had two programs like PTs and LIVE that for some reason did not work well together at the same time. Would partitioning them on separte places on the HD be better?

DeadlyKungFu · Post by **DeadlyKungFu** » Fri Jun 16, 2006 11:07 pm

Putting them on seperate drives is better. As far as I know with the setup you're suggesting the drive will have to work just as hard.
Streaming is better with audio on a seperate drive. Plus with 2 drives when you want to rebuild all you have to do is reinstall the OS and apps, the data is already setup. Better yet, RAID.

brainray · Post by **brainray** » Sat Jun 17, 2006 11:39 am

I agree, partitioning doesn't make too much sense at all, because the drive has to skip between system, application and media files anyway.

AFAIK Apple recommends to not partition drives because of this.

Best

Ray

Nokatus · Post by **Nokatus** » Sat Jun 17, 2006 8:02 pm

(Speaking from the Windows XP point of view here.) Actually it still makes a lot of sense partitioning your HD, especially having a reasonably sized separate system partition. Not because of performance benefits, but it simplifies backing up the system and speeds up disaster recovery considerably. This is something I tend to bring up since it really can be a life saver

When you have the system partition suitably sized for the OS and applications (I'd say about 5-15 GB) and store the actual project files (audio tracks, sequencer project files and so on) on their dedicated partition, you can save or restore a low-level partition image of your OS and application environment in a matter of minutes. It would be kind of redundant imaging a whole HD: it makes more sense to store and back up the project data as a regular directory hierarchy, accessible without a specific imaging software. What you actually want an image of is your software environment and system configuration. Having all that on a dedicated, appropriately sized partition, you never have to worry about losing your work or specifying a partial restore if you indeed need to recover your software environment from an image.

This way you can be sure you're always able to quickly restore your system state 100% to a given moment in time, I mean, being really completely sure of how the system will be after the restore, without managing a large imaging scheme of partial updates, recovery points and so on.

When installing a new system, after installing the OS, Live, plugins and other applications, tuning the whole thing to work perfectly etc, just grab a compressed image of the C: partition, burn it onto a DVD -- and recover back to that exact state in a few minutes if something happens to go wrong. Further more, if you're like me and like to test every experimental alpha release of something that happens to hit KVR

, it's nice to know that you can just slap back such an image from time to time and quickly cleanse your system of all the clutter. That has been the biggest practical benefit of partitioning for me in the last couple of years.

brainray · Post by **brainray** » Sun Jun 18, 2006 8:43 am

I kind of agree, but it's also easy to just not include the files you don't want to backup

Also, IMHO, 5-15 GB is quite small as system partition (OS X and XP). e.g. the Reaktor libray takes about 1GB. Decoding cache of Live often haas 10 GB here. Okay, you can flush it, but it's good to have enough reserved space. Sure,you _can_ put all these things on other partitions with aliases, but in the end this makes things more complicated and unreliable.

I would recommend at least 40 GB for such a system partition/disk to have enough reserve on the long run. Also keep in mind that especially Windows allways needs like 20% free space (better more) on each partition - otherwise you'll feel a dramatic speed loss, even if you degrafment the drive frequently.
The MacOS HFS+ file system only needs like 5% because it defragments itself.

Best

Ray

Machinate · Post by **Machinate** » Sun Jun 18, 2006 9:41 am

For windows I do a 20-30 gig partition for the OS+apps, and use the rest for the data (reaktor lib, samples, recordings, live sets, vst library, live cache+Library etc) On my current system the OS partition C: is only 14gig, a bit on the small side, since I've installed every piece of software known to man on this one

This greatly simplifies doing OS reinstalls - I have to backup my desktop content, my email shit and then I'm ready to go.

So the separation shouldn't be app<=>app, but apps<=>data. If at all possible do it on separate disks to optimize performance.

I must admit to not knowing a helluva lot about this crap, but this has worked for me (I think I've had to do one reformat in about 3 years with this laptop)

Nokatus · Post by **Nokatus** » Sun Jun 18, 2006 10:55 pm

brainray wrote:I kind of agree, but it's also easy to just not include the files you don't want to backup

Also, IMHO, 5-15 GB is quite small as system partition (OS X and XP). e.g. the Reaktor libray takes about 1GB.

To me the idea and the whole beauty of it is that you don't have to specify a partial imaging scheme when either storing an image or restoring the system. When taking an image you're not dealing on the file level, but on actual sector level, backing up or restoring a whole bootable system environment identically in one go. If the need arises to revive the system, this kind of partitioning allows you to perform that very quickly. In fact, if you have made changes to your system which you want to revert back from -- and the changes would take more than a few minutes to undo -- it would be more convenient just to slap in the image and continue working

The system partition contains only the OS and the applications, not project data or other data files (like synth/sampler patch libraries, for example). I have found 5-15 gigabytes to be very adequate to my needs.

Silverfish · Post by **Silverfish** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 4:37 am

Do yourself a favor and RTFM with partition magic. I'm currently trying to restore my applications partition. It's there. It just doesn't want to play nice with the other partitions. I'm either stupid or unlucky. Probaby both.

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 5:11 am

PM is cool, but potentially dangerous

Nokatus · Post by **Nokatus** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 6:17 pm

I still forgot to mention the other big benefit of dedicated system partitions: have more than one of them and you can multi boot between them. This way your audio system stays completely separated, and doing an overhaul of your non-audio stuff doesn't mean potentially compromising your music making environment -- and the other way around.

princ3 · Post by **princ3** » Wed Jul 26, 2006 12:26 am

brainray wrote:
Decoding cache of Live often haas 10 GB here. Okay, you can flush it, but it's good to have enough reserved space. Sure,you _can_ put all these things on other partitions with aliases, but in the end this makes things more complicated and unreliable.

Ray

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