Recording, do i need to partition my hard drive? Options

[mssj]

I have just bought a powerbook g4, I plan to use it also as a recorder for live gigs. do I need to partiion the 80 gig harddrive, or can I use all the frive space mixed with the other data ?

/Stefan

[CanadaRAM]

Partitioning can actually improve performance: here's how.

The *first* partition you create is on the fastest portion of the hard drive (the outside tracks, which have a higher angular velocity at a given RPM. Remember the roundabout in the playground? Easy if you sit in the middle, but radically faster action on the outside edge). The second and subsequent partitions are slower to access.

So if you partition your drive, you can contain your audio data into the faster partition, guaranteeing better performance compared to being scattered across all tracks of the drive. Also: with a smaller partition, random access is marginally faster within the partition because the head has to seek across fewer tracks.

But even more important than partitioning is to have as much RAM as you can afford. If you can run your apps and OS totally in RAM, you reduce the number of pageouts to the drive. This makes the machine faster and keeps your drive heads within your audio data files.

Thanks
Trevor
www.CanadaRAM.com