to partition or not to partition

pb wrote on 2/11/2003, 10:55 PM

Howdy,

Never professed to be very technical with PCs so here is the question:

I have a 60 gig MAxtor fire wire I split 50/50 for DVD file storage and rendering. Just installed an internal Western Digital 100 gig with 8 meg cache for media (old Lacie is very tired). Would you partition the 100 gig?

Peter

Comments

riredale wrote on 2/12/2003, 1:19 AM

Depends on the purpose. If you are going to use it for video, why partition? For DV purposes, your drive will hold only 7 hours of video, which is not a lot for many projects.

For me, partitioning makes sense in several cases:

(1) It makes it easier to selectively back up, if you're using something like DriveImage.

(2) If you are getting a lot of slack (wasted space due to large clusters) then you can make smaller partitions and reduce cluster size. For video, this doesn't matter very much.

If you use a product like PartitionMagic, you can always do partitions in the future without destroying your data in the process.

mikkie wrote on 2/12/2003, 9:20 AM

FWIW: think the cluster size issue sort of maxes out at a certain point, & most of the reasons for partitioning have roots in old technology. If you run multiple OS's you'll need multiple partitions or drives - same if you want to use an ntfs drive & still want something fat32 you can use to exchange data.

watson wrote on 2/12/2003, 9:56 AM

No logical reason to partition a dedicated video drive.
That I can think of anyway.
W

PAW wrote on 2/12/2003, 3:41 PM

if it's your only drive a system partition can make sense you can trah it and protect your data on the other partition - if not one big lump is best.