[aehaas]

When my new MBP comes in I want to partition the 320 drive into a 40 gig for Vista, a 30 gig for scratch, +/or alternate start up disc, and the rest for OS X and all my programs. When you start up the disc utility it does not say what partition is located in the fastest disc section. How can one be assured to put OS X into this partition location? Is it the top one or bottom on the disc partition set up screen?? Or maybe it will automatically be the largest partition?

aehaas

[B Gallagher]

Technically the fastest part of the disc would be that close to the middle, but a 320GB drive has more than one platter.

I'm not aware of there being any particular speed differences based upon which 'section' of the drive you install the OS on. Especially not if you have multiple platters. Someone else would probably be able to tell you more though.

[bearcatrp]

I would use a external hard disk as scratch if you want more speed. Using the same drive would be the same as using virtual memory (writing to the same disk twice). You'll want a 7500 rpm external disk drive if you can.

[OreoCookie]

Having a scratch partition is useless, unless it is located on another drive.
Two partitions (one for OS X, another for Windows) is sufficient.

[TETENAL]

Mac OS X automatically moves frequently used files to the most quickly accessible place on disk ("Adaptive Hot File Clustering"). As OreoCookie said a scratch partition is useless on the same drive, so keep it to one partition for each OS.

[tooki]

Originally Posted by B Gallagher 

Technically the fastest part of the disc would be that close to the middle, but a 320GB drive has more than one platter.

I'm not aware of there being any particular speed differences based upon which 'section' of the drive you install the OS on. Especially not if you have multiple platters. Someone else would probably be able to tell you more though.

It absolutely matters, and the fastest part is the outside (beginning) of the disk, not the middle or the innermost part. Furthermore, multi-platter disks do not fill one platter, then move to the next: they use all platters in parallel.

In Disk Utility, the top of the partition map is the fastest area.

[aehaas]

On my current MBP 2.4 I could only use Bootcamp for 2 partitions, an Apple and a Window partition (if I remember correctly). Is there a new version of Bootcamp that will allow 2 Apple and 1 or 2 window partitions or can I use Disc Utility to do this all?

aehaas

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by aehaas 

On my current MBP 2.4 I could only use Bootcamp for 2 partitions, an Apple and a Window partition (if I remember correctly). Is there a new version of Bootcamp that will allow 2 Apple and 1 or 2 window partitions or can I use Disc Utility to do this all?

aehaas

Boot Camp will ONLY work on a single partition disk and will ONLY make one additional partition, which you can do what you want to with. Disk Utility can create all the partitions you want, but it CANNOT create a Windows-compatible partition and format it.

If I "really needed" multiple partitions for Windows, I'd use a Windows app to split the one I originally made with Boot Camp. But, having been a multiple partition Windows guy for many years, I have given that up completely and never looked back; it's totally unnecessary for setting up Windows XP. If you're looking at doing this for multiple other OSs, that would be different. But you say you want 2 for Windows...not needed, and very much more complex than would be worthwhile to do.