HELLO GUYS,
I hvae a G4/800/ 80 Gig w/ 17in. flat screen ,Fire Wire 400.
I recently bought a160G Mercury(OWC) hard drive and would like to know how to get the best performance from it.

1.Do I keep my audio software on the internal drive and save to the external drive?
2. Is there some optimization software to use so that my disks won't get fragmented?

I am using DP4.5 also recently aquired.
Any suggestiosn please?

Keep the app in the internal drive.

Use the Mercury for the audio files only.

It's always dangerous to defrag with no backup, I assume you're in OS 9: use techtools/diskwarrior, norton can do too. Just keep away form the disk doctor, never had problem under classic with but there are horror stories around worth keeping in mind (and NEVER use them in OS X).

Once system/apps are up and running, there's little fragmentation happening there, the working files it's a different problem.

lepetitmartien,
Thanks for the info.
I am using OSX on my machine.
Some one told me that OSX does not need to be defragged. Is that correct?

OS X as a good unix BSD under the hood defrags automatically files under 30 MB. The file system is also way more efficient to handle fragmented files.

So the main question is what to do with BIG files: either you use a dedicated software (with the usual dangers it can have) techtools/diskwarrior for example. Or you use another drive, copy the files on the 2nd drive, erase the first one and copy back the files.

But you can't do that with the system drive! (copy the system erase copy back, it won't do at all) you need to clone it etc. which is a very different business.

There are basically ( i.e. at least ) two ways to defrag audio-files harddrive under OS-X.

1)
Buy TechTool 4.0.x it both rebuilds folder structure and optimizes files.

2)
Use a spare external harddrive doesnt need to as speedy as your original
audio harddrive you use for recording.
When the audio drive seems fragmented simply copy all audio to the spare drive.
Format the audio-drive and copy all audio back to it.

Your done.

Cheers: Dixiechicken

THANKS for all of your help !!!
GOOD RESONANCE!