[PhilB]

This has never been as issue for me before since I only had relatively small HD's (2-6 GB). I've always liked a single partition for the simplicity of it but now, with my G4 450, I've begun to this some partitioning might be a good idea. I have a 20BG HD currently. Would it be a good idea to do some partitioning, e.g. System vs Apps, etc.? I would appreciate your input. TIA.

Phil Bennett
[email protected]
ICQ# 65765428

[tasslehawf]

Personally, I don't partition unless I need to run other OS's. Currently, on my G4 and on my older G3, I have run 2 HD's: one 10 gig and one 22gig, and it works great. The other reason for this configuration is that I need a lot of continuous space for video capture.

[sblunden]

I partitioned my 28 GIG drive for DV i made a 1 GIG partition for my apps and the rest for DV storage. I had no real reason to do this but i'm glad i am. for some strange reason my 1 GIG partition went bad and now i have to reinitialize it. By having all my video on a sperate partition all my work was saved, i just had to reinstall the apps.

I have one question. I haven't reinitialized the partion out of fear that it might effect the other partition. I don't think that it would but I didn't want to lose hours of work. So can I reinitialize the partition with close to 100% certianty that it will not effect my other partition?

I think the best thing to do is buy a G4 with the 10GIG HD and add a second drive. Thats what I'm going to do when i get my own G4 instead of using a friends. You can get drives much cheaper than what Apple charges.



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- s p e n c e r

These are the good resons to Partition your Drives.
But first something you should know about your Drive (Correct me if I am wrong any one) Say you partition your HD into 4 Drives right, the first drive that mounts when you startup is the outer part of the disks, so they are the fastest. So if you use VM then that would be the best drive to set as for that, say the size of amount of VM you are going to use so say 300 MB, make partition one 340 MB. Second by putting your Apps and System and VM on different partitions will not increase speed that much. You get a speed affect when you have different hard drives, not the same hard drive split into many. But you can control what stuff gets the fastest part of the disk. Say VM on the first Partition of 340 MB and the System on the second partition say 1 GIG.

What does speed you up and may protect you is that the there is a desktop file for each partition and each partition has it own file structure, so if one partition gets damaged and is unreadable, the others are fine. Make sure you use HFS + for each partition.

These are only sugestions, I think it would be good to at least split it up in to at least 2 HD's maybe 4. But if you are going to do desktop video you might want one partition cuz you will need the space. In any event I hope I answered your question and again I am not 100% sure if I am right about the first partition being on the outer part of the disk, but if it is that will have the fastest read write access.

The MacOS will support 8 Partitions per disk but once you partition it, you are stuck with it unless you are willing to erase it all. If you have say 256 MB of memory or more, forget about even using VM, if you have less, might want to turn it on.

SO good things about partition:
1 Give people there own drive space
2 A little control on what gets on the fastest part of the disk.
3 Smaller desktop files means better performance.
4. Backup space
5. Some what protection from the spread of a virus.
6. Can encypt a drive with important data with out doing the whole disk.
CONS

1. The partitions without VM and the SYSTEM can be erased
2. Less spaces for large files
3. A damaged partition can cause damage to the whole disk meaning having to reformat it all.
4. While you have little control over what gets the faster part of the disk, it wont speed your system up much, only 2 real Hard Drives can do that. Partition drives might even be a bit slower.
5. Once done, if you dont like it you have to erase the entire drive.


Go for 2 Partitions at least, I have 2 real HD's and I have at times had it partition into 2 or more drives but the last time I did my HD I left it as one.

email me if you have any other questions or if I am wrong about the outer disk and the first partition. (Those that tell me I am wrong must be able to backup there claim)