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Partitioning OSX on Macbook Pro
Hello guys and gals,
I have a question about partitioning my 120GB HD on a Macbook Pro. I am curious if there are any advantages or disadvantages to partitioning the OSX partition into two parts 1: for system files and apps 2: for media such as project files, After Effects 7 renders etc… (and a possible 3rd for WIN XP)
I am curious if this method would speed up performance or slow it down. I have an external HD (G-Tech RAID FW800-500GB) that I use for capturing and all of my FCP 5 footage/scratch and for other project related data and backups but, I do not carry it with me all of the time.
I have had several dicussions with friends and the results are 50-50. Can someone please tell me if this is a good idea or a bad one? I would really appreciate your input.
Thanks in advance for your assistance.
Mike
My system configuration:
MacBook Pro 15-inch
2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4MB on-chip shared L2 cache
2GB RAM
667MHz frontside bus
ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics processor (256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM)
120GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive -
6 Replies
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Partitioning will not speed what you are doing up. One of the main reasons to use a separate drive is because your main drive is already running the OS, applications, etc. making it also handle large media files, just gives it to much to do all at once. While partitioning the drive may make it look like a separate drive, it is still the same physical drive that must do all the work.
Use a completely different drive.
If you want something more portable look into a small portable hard drive.
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Thank you very much for your thoughts. This clears things up for me. Have a great day!
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All true EXCEPT for the XP part. If you want to use BootCamp, then yes, you need what I believe is a 10GB partition of your main drive. I use Parallels though on an external FW drive and it works great too. A new version of BootCamp just came out, so I don’t know if that allows for FW booting of XP.
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“All true EXCEPT for the XP part”
I was never talking about windows, I was talking about media performance. Which is what his main question was about.
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I partitioned my 160gb drive on my MacBook Pro 17″ Duo. That way I can use Superduper to make a backup of my system boot partition as a smaller size that takes less time to save and later reinstall than if it was a full 160gb. The second partition holds all my data like graphics, movies, etc. I am editing HDV on just the internal drive with no problems in FCP. I get 42MB/S read and write on the boot partition and 22MB/s read and write on the data partition.
Gary
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Thanks to all of you for your valuable insight. Have a great weekend!
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