Formatting A Hard Drive, To format or not? Options

[Foxyphil]

Emac G4 . 1.25 Ghz. 770 ram. 80Gb hard drive. Focusrite saffire with bundled cubase le.

Ive concluded that I cant record many tracks with this set up - which amazes me but anyways - I am going to get an external hard drive (300gb).

My question, to anyone kind enough to give feedback, is this. Should I have the hard disk formatted to osX? The company will do this for free, possibly partition the disk as well. I know nothing about this stuff, but recall reading on site that it s best NOT to format the drive.

If possible, I want to use BFD drums, and waves plug ins. Im happy to commit stuff to audio. "Running 12 instances" of anything seems impossible anyway. But should I get this drive formatted (mac is running Panther), or hold fire on that?

Once again any feedback greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Phil

[lancet]

Any hard drive you get can easily be formatted with Disk Utility which is in your Utilities folder. The whole process takes literally less than 20 seconds.

Although I see little use for it these days, partitioning is just as easy and is also done with Disk Utility.

I'd probably format it myself. I've had issues in the past and just feel better if I format it myself when I get it.

[lepetitmartien]

You remember some old problem we had when IDE drives came in mac at first, the utility at the time did format at low level and IDE on mac and low format were a big no-no. Now the lo level means only overwrite all the drive with 0, not a real low level format so there's no problem.

It is normal you can't record many tracks as you can't ask a drive to host the virtual memory, the system and apps and the recording. keep things separate and you'll se improvements.

Also, you're a bit short of RAM, so when you can… go the higher you can, your OS X will thank you.

Now, as Lancet told you so, you can format and partition yourself by using Apple disk Utility, which is straightforward. Just select the right drive

On the partition or no partition, I'm mixed. But I can say that by dividing the drive in 2 or 3 you'll help the drive at "finding things": smaller directories, less journey to make for the heads, and when you want to erase one partition you copy on the other (think twice and go slowly) format and copy back. Instant defragmentation…

[cornutt]

Also, it wouldn't be a bad idea to install a system on the external drive while you're at it. That way, you can boot from it if your internal drive ever dies. If you do, you want that in a separate partition. I think 15G would cover it for a minimal OS install and some recovery tools.