Opinions please: Partitioning one's hd

[jeddypoo]

Can I get some opinions on this? I recently switched back to 10.3.9 on my G4 after experiencing all sorts of weird problems with Tiger, and all of those problems are now.....uh, gone. But there was some stuff I was running in Tiger that Panther doesn't seem to like, and it would be good to have it as an option, so I've thought of a dual Tiger/Panther partitioning, but I have a feeling that it could cause some problems and possibly compromise how smoothly things are running again. I mean I hadn't even considered it before because it just seemed like it was asking for trouble. What do YOU think?

just so you know, I run:

Logic on a dual 1.42 MDD G4 with an Echo Audiofire 12 and a 300 GB FW800 external drive for recording.

[jeddypoo]

I am shocked and appalled that no one here has an opinion on this.

Shocked.

and appalled.

[sonikbliss]

You should be fine setting up your system drive with partitions for different OS versions. I've had mine partitioned 3 ways for a few years now with no problems: 9.2.2, 10.3.9, and one that I had set up for Tiger but will probably end up with Leopard instead. The only thing I would highly recommend with this setup is that your system drive is huge and fast (200-300Gigs) so that each OS partition has plenty of space and can run properly.

[jeddypoo]

I was thinking of two partitions. My ext. drives are big but my internal is 180 gigs. Do you think that's enough.

I used to have 9 and 10 partitioned, but that was long before I was doing digital sound work.

[sonikbliss]

I was thinking of two partitions. My ext. drives are big but my internal is 180 gigs. Do you think that's enough.

I used to have 9 and 10 partitioned, but that was long before I was doing digital sound work.

180G is probably fine for 2 partitions. Basically you should shoot for a drive large enough that it will never be more than 50% filled. I know that may seem like a waste of space, but SATA drives have been shown to take a serious drop in performance once they are over half full. It's because data is written from the inside out on a drive, and when it has to access the larger outer rings for data it's gonna take longer.

[jeddypoo]

Great, thanks. I knew it was good to always keep a lot of free space on one's HD for that reason, but 50% seems like a lot! Actually, I've been meaning to backup some stuff on my hard drive lately because I've noticed some lags that aren't normal and I'm down only 25 gigs because I took some other bands' projects off the ext. and haven't put them to a hard copy yet.

[Kevin Kitchel]

Remember to back your data up!

Also, you will get about a 0.5-0.7% increase in performance on the 1st partition. Woo!