Partioning Fw Drive With Audio And Video, should I partition an external fw drive? Options

[tgwj]

Hi, I have an protools Mbox with my 12" powerbook. I just ordered a fw drive to dedicate to audio (Lacie d2, 160 gigs) I am planning to use the fw drive for iMovie projects too and I was wondering if I should partition it to keep audio and video files separate or should i just leave it as it is?

Thanks!

[PristineRec]

You might want to partition it for a couple reasons that I can think of.

I recall reading in the ProTools manual a recommendation that you periodically wipe your audio drive clean and reformat, due to gradual disk fragmentation after lots of files have been written and rewritten to it over time. A defragmented drive will theoretically be able to read and write faster, which will help keep ProTools from getting disk errors, and help you maintain higher track counts without overtaxing the drive. The larger the partition (or entire drive) you are working on, the longer the drive head may have to travel to read or write. And with sessions with heavy edits or track counts, it might have to do a lot of jumping around on the drive. If you only record to a smaller partition on that drive, the head will never have to move very far to read or write a file. If you have a partition that you use for nothing but recording sessions to, you can periodically reformat the partition, having only to backup your ProTools sessions, and not risking losing all sorts of other files.

The other reason is just convenience. It might help you keep all your files organized by keeping only ProTools sessions on one drive and only your video projects on the other. If you do frequent projects, the files and sessions might start piling up after a while and get disorganized, especially if you start using that drive for storing or backing up other kinds of files.

I have 2 firewire drives for my Powerbook. One is my recording drive, which has two partitions. One is the partition I record to and keep my active projects, the other partition is where I move the projects that are done (for now).
My other drive is a slower, cheaper drive that I use strictly for backups and archives. After each recording session, I copy the ProTools session from my recording drive to my backup drive, then put my backup drive into a firepeoof safe. This might be overkill for some, but I use this system professionally, and I need to maintain copies of all master recordings, just in case the client ever needs them again. I have charged people a lot of money to record a lot of hours of music, and losing the master recordings is not an option.

I might have gotten a little bit off topic there, but hopefully it was helpful anyway.