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superblue · Apr 15, 2003, 02:29 AM

My thinking is that at the moment, I'm always playing MP3s from the same hard drive as I'm running my system. Would running the system on a seperate hard drive speed things up, or is that just wishful thinking?

I suppose it's not a case of speeding up, more of helping it not slow down, but the result would be the same

Powaqqatsi · Apr 15, 2003, 03:06 AM

It wil speed things up. Since you could write faster on one drive while reading those MP3s on the other.

Geobunny · Apr 15, 2003, 03:28 AM

I'm assuming your drives are even half-decent, in which case they'll have a buffer for reading and writing on disk. Unless you're doing a significant amount of writing at one time, the speed gain of using two disks will be almost negligible due to the fact that your MP3 read will be buffered.

Feel free to try it though. To be honest, any speed increase you may see is more likely attributable to the fact that by moving your MP3s onto a different drive, you've made more contiguous startup-disk space available for virtual memory (assuming your drive is optimized/defragmented)

superblue · Apr 15, 2003, 04:01 AM

At the moment I've got everything on a 60GB 7200rpm ATA Maxtor HD on my 733MHz G4, with 1.25GB Ram

I've been thinking about getting a second drive, so that my system and files are on seperate disks, which would make updating the system easier (in the event of the need to do a clean reinstall for example, or when it comes to updating to 10.3).

I was just wondering if for example, having my constantly read MP3s on one drive, 'files' (such as my .ai, .psd files etc) on another, and the system folder on yet another... (!) would speed up the system.

I don't know the details of how HDs work, perhaps the buffer you mentioned makes the difference negligible. In which case, the only advantage I'd get would be in the case of system installations. I was just wondering if I'd get a bonus of a speed increase too.

DeathMan · Apr 15, 2003, 04:30 AM

it might if you made a partition on one of the drives (the less frequently used perhaps) dedicated as the swap. That way, the head won't have to move so much when reading/writing to/from swap.

ShotgunEd · Apr 15, 2003, 04:36 AM

I'd say a seperate drive on a seperate bus used soley for swap would have to speed things up. Swap could be used while the other disk is busy etc.

superblue · Apr 15, 2003, 05:34 AM

Originally posted by ShotgunEd:
I'd say a seperate drive on a seperate bus used soley for swap would have to speed things up. Swap could be used while the other disk is busy etc.

So someone enlighten me as to what "swap" is all about then please

Cipher13 · Apr 15, 2003, 09:14 AM

Originally posted by superblue:
So someone enlighten me as to what "swap" is all about then please

Swap, scratch... free space used by the OS to store stuff that it doesn't need in RAM immediately... or that it can't fit in RAM once the real stuff runs short... sorta. Bad description.

Anyway. I'm gonna stripe two 120 gig 8 meg Barracudas together. That oughta speed things up substantially.

GENERAL_SMILEY · Apr 15, 2003, 09:31 AM

Originally posted by Cipher13:
Swap, scratch... free space used by the OS to store stuff that it doesn't need in RAM immediately... or that it can't fit in RAM once the real stuff runs short... sorta. Bad description.

Anyway. I'm gonna stripe two 120 gig 8 meg Barracudas together. That oughta speed things up substantially.

Hardware RAID card should, as I understand it, make some difference as well.

DeathMan · Apr 15, 2003, 07:54 PM

Swap is also known as virtual memory. if you're familiar with that term.

Some apps use a lot of virtual memory. Photoshop might if you open a file that requires more memory than you have available, it will use hard disk space as RAM.

OS X seems really good with this. Apps running in the BG not doing much go into swap, thus freeing up some RAM for photoshop.

Millennium · Apr 15, 2003, 09:27 PM

As always, the answer is "it depends".

A separate swap partition on a separate drive would speed up the system, if you do a lot of disk-intensive stuff and a lot of memory-intensive stuff. As others have mentioned, this would allow the memory disk to be accessed independently from the data disk.

Likewise, if you were to RAID several disks together, that would speed the system up, because you could pull data from multiple disks at once.

You can also geet faster hard drives, rather than multiple drives. OSX does a fair bit of stuff on disk, so this will speed you up.

Other than situations like this, though, either there's be no speedup at all, or it would be too small to be worth the extra trouble. If you're going to try and speed up the OS, go for faster drives rather than more drives (especially for your boot drive).

11011001 · Apr 15, 2003, 09:45 PM

Originally posted by GENERAL_SMILEY:
Hardware RAID card should, as I understand it, make some difference as well.

I assure you it does

On my system, startup times dramatically improved.. other things like navigating the file system was quicker, and it helped with maya ple.. that and having a seperate partition for the swap files.

And of course copying files is ridicoulsy fast. Can get like 20 mb/s copying from one partition on the RAID, to another partition on the same RAID. From another HD, it goes as fast as that one can read.

But, the hardware card is expensive. $400.00 CDN when I bought mine.

theory · Apr 15, 2003, 09:50 PM

As I understand it most MP3 players
buffer the songs in memory (that how
itunes can do that cross fading and stuff)
so getting a second HD will not speed
anything up.

I just handed in a project last night
about disk scheduling so talking about
disks kind of makes me dissy (it was
a HARD project I mean real HARD)

subrosasupport · Apr 16, 2003, 06:52 PM

Originally posted by 11011001:
I assure you it does

On my system, startup times dramatically improved.. other things like navigating the file system was quicker, and it helped with maya ple.. that and having a seperate partition for the swap files.

And of course copying files is ridicoulsy fast. Can get like 20 mb/s copying from one partition on the RAID, to another partition on the same RAID. From another HD, it goes as fast as that one can read.

But, the hardware card is expensive. $400.00 CDN when I bought mine.

OS X ships with a Disk Utility that supports the creation of RAID. You can hooked up two IDE drives and format them as RAID Level 0. I used to have software RAID on my OS 8/9 setup and was able to see about 1.8X improvment in transfer rate.