mac osx question

[xconnyx]

since i departure from windows to osx right now i'm used to have my main drive partitioned as "system" and "local storage" since on windows systems you do better store all your basic data (like: in/out-voices, office stuff, little mp3 folder, text data, backups of program data(email, cubase fx presets), basically everything you'll need to keep when deleting the system to reinstall) on another hard drive/partition.

i can see the major problem with using two partitions and using one as "system" and one as "audio drive", but this wouldn't be what i aim for. i would rather use a fire wire or usb2 drive as "audio drive" then my secondary partition on the internal drive.

actually i don't know if usb2 is fast and stable enough to handle daw stuff but firewire will be.

so this would be my plan right now (don't forget i'm new to osx and open for any kind of suggestion that might help my system run better):

internal drive 320gb: partitionA150gb=system, partitionB150gb=basic data
external FW drive: audio drive (daisy chain with motus )
external USB2 drive: time machine (theres a usb2 hub involved)

 

[TheDriller]

I think i need to clarify,

I have 3 partitions on my internal drive, "OSX" , "Vista", and "Storage".

the Storage partition is used for storing sample libraries and other resources.
it is not used as a record drive, right now im recording straight to the OSX partition, not ideal i know, but it sure as hell works.

the whole point of this arrangement is that i can erase and re-install any one of the operating systems without losing close to 200Gb of samples and all the other data in the "Storage" partition.

next on the GAS list is a 1.5TB internal drive for recording

 

[dani]

DSS3, your worries are unfounded, having files on a seperate partition is no different to having a slightly fragmented hard disk. the files are just located at different places in the drive.

besides, it's not like samples are loaded from the hard drive on the fly - they're loaded on to memory, and played back from there. Unless of course, you've ran out of RAM, and you've started paging, but that's going to be slow as hell no matter if the drive is partitioned or not!

OS X is the most stable OS there is, although cubase isn't really that stable.. i've had maybe 3 kernel panics in the entire time i've been using OS X (they are like blue screens of death, but for OS X.. and gray!). although it makes me feel uneasy if cubase doesn't crash at some point.. haha.

and yes, you can open windows .cpr files on OS X cubase, and the other way around. very useful! you may sometimes need to relocate the media though, cubase has a habit of forgetting where the "Audio" folder is, when you change over.

good luck, and welcome to mac-land.. haha.

thanks,

 

[JBroll]

Without tracking down a source, how does that not make sense? If you're accessing files from both partitions at once, unless I'm completely mistaken here, the IDE bus has to work harder.

Unless you're partitioning to keep your system drive on the outer edge of the platter (fastest part of the drive), I don't see any point in doing it. If you're using a partition as a backup, you are fucked super hard when that thing fails physically.

I think it would take quite a slowdown (percentages in the middle double digits, at least) to be so bad that the other benefits aren't worth it. I'll just restate what I said earlier - with a physical fuckup neither of our schemes will work, but if the operating system fucks up (as they do, period, no matter how much you love OS X or I love *nix systems or whatthefuckever else is around) then I have my data and you don't.

On top of countless other things (having another line of defense against odd bullshit clogging up the OS partition, for example - which, as an occasional BSD user, former Windows user, and occasional OS X borrower I know is a fucking nightmare - and making defragging an order of magnitude less complicated, just to name the first two that pop into mind), that data recovery thing is just one more line of defense.

I don't see how the performance loss you're claiming is to be expected and not circumvented in any way at all. I can certainly see accessing physically distant locations to be an issue, but I would like to see a source if you can find one. I'd take another safety net over a possible performance loss - or even a *confirmed* performance loss less than 30-40 percent (possibly higher depending on the importance of the data and the last time I locked backup drives in my safety deposit box on the moon) - because the hard drives aren't likely to be the first bottleneck hit.

Jeff

 

[JBroll]

OS X is the most stable OS there is

Be careful with things like this, we've had enough OS X vs. Everything Else threads as it is and this is a statement just begging to be argued with to the point of derailment - even if it were right, we could do without it.

Jeff