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Which drives should I partition on my new Mac Pro?
Hi, this is my first post here but have learned a lot recently just by visiting various threads. I’m new to Mac and Final Cut Studio so I have a few questions about setting up the system and hard drives. I will be learning FCS and CS4 by working on various SD DV and HDV/AVCHD projects so I want my system flexible but as high performance as I can muster. I will likely be working mostly in FCP and AE for a while and do intend to burn blu-ray discs eventually.
My system is a current Mac Pro quad core with 8GB RAM with current versions of final cut and adobe suites. I will do a clean install with snow leopard. I have a 640gb main drive and I’ve purchased three 1tb Western Digital black internal drives. I will partition my main drive because I may want to also run a windows OS eventually for blu-ray playback. The other 3 drives are intended for project files, media/capture and back-up respectively. I don’t have the budget for a RAID at the moment. So my questions for this thread are:
1. How much should I dedicate for the second partition on the OS drive for eventual windows 7/blu-ray playback?
2. Should I partition any of the three additional drives?
3. If I should partition any of those additional drives, how many partitions should I make and what sizes should the partitions be for each drive?
4. Is my plan for my four drives a sound one for my purposes? (os, projects, media, backup)Thanks in advance for any help.
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3 Replies
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Partitions is something almost from the past.
If you want to install Windows, the partition is done in the moment of installing Bootcamp or whatever software you will use.
Have a look to the Apple-Windows in a Mac forum.[John Maguire] “2. Should I partition any of the three additional drives?
3. If I should partition any of those additional drives, how many partitions should I make and what sizes should the partitions be for each drive? “
Why you want to make partitions?
Partitions only slow down HDs tasks.
All the partitions in a HD are managed by the same bus.
If you want to organize your stuff, use folders.
Cheers,
rafael -
Thanks for the tips. I’ll check on boot camp and whether it makes any sense to partition some of the main drive now, or only at the time of utilizing boot camp. I thought that boot camp forces you to partition so you can boot from the alternate OS. I just thought it would be easier or safer to partition now before I am forced to by boot camp later. I obviously need to learn more, but I’ve read that a partition is also appropriate for those who want to keep an older Mac OS version in case of problems with a new OS- I believe it was an article on this very site (Hoffman’s guidelines for a rock solid Mac?) Again, my thinking was that making a partition “just in case” might be a good idea.
Regarding partitions for the other drives, thanks for the feedback not to do it. After reading various articles which may be a few years old (one on Ken Stone’s site I believe), I assumed that there were reasons for partitioning a large drive like 1tb in particular because it is so large, or that you would partition so that you isolate and use the “faster” part of the drive. But I guess that advice is out of date now? Thanks again.
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[John Maguire] ” I thought that boot camp forces you to partition so you can boot from the alternate OS. I just thought it would be easier or safer to partition now before I am forced to by boot camp later.”But I’m not sure that if you make the partition Bootcam can use it.
I would rather let Bootcamp do it on installing.[John Maguire] “but I’ve read that a partition is also appropriate for those who want to keep an older Mac OS version in case of problems “
That’s a good policy, but having 4 HDs, you better install a bootable system in another HD.
Think that if your main HD fails both system will fail.[John Maguire] “I assumed that there were reasons for partitioning a large drive like 1tb in particular because it is so large, or that you would partition so that you isolate and use the “faster” part of the drive”
Having partitions is like having more discs (?) but with only one system to write and read from those discs. If you are using media that is in two different partitions of the same disc, all the process will be slower than without partitions. Whenever the system have to look for something, will have more work to do with partitions.
Best,
rafael
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