Hard Drive Partition for Audio?

[btswire]

I just purchased a new 1 tb internal drive that will be used only for media. I heard a rumor that having audio on a smaller partition will allow a DAW to access it more efficiently.

The idea behind this is that rather than having to search a huge hard drive for the audio files, it only has to look in one small area. Assuming that all audio files are correctly placed in a single location (ie the corresponding audio files folder) does this actually make a difference?

[farview]

I have always heard this as well. It seems to make sense. But I've been hearing this for over a decade, I wonder if it's something that was true but doesn't make much difference now.

[LazarusLong]

Pro Tools is a little unhappy with partitions over 750GB. Not "won't work" unhappy, but it dings performance.

Can't speak with authority on other DAWs, sorry.

[vvv]

Another consideration is that smaller partitions are quicker to defragment, and (at least seem) easier to organize.

[TimOBrien]

If you keep your drive de-fragged the drive will go for the first open space in it's index and it won't matter. If your drive is messy and it has to hunt around for open space then you'll have slower access and more chances of clicks/pops/dropouts.

If you use Windows, get Auslogics free defragger; it's better than Microsofts.

[Jon~T]

I just went through this research last month when I bought my 1TB LaCie external.

Split into two partitions. 500GB and remainder More really doesn't make sense.

Partition 0 will be the outer one which is fastest.
Partition 1 will be the inner one which is a bit slower

Use only 1 at a time, accessing both partitions is very slow.

Disable spotlight indexing/windows indexing.


Haven't had any problems with Pro Tools on this drive.

[Marc Alan Goodman]

Makes sense. I have all my drives partitioned because it used to really effect performance. Now it just helps to keep things organized. Might give up on it soon though.

[kingmetal]

The performance gains you stand to make by doing this are extremely minimal and this is not a known best practice for any kind of high performance computing. I work corporate IT for a large entertainment company that handles extremely high end 3D rendering and we don't do anything like this.

Upgrading your drive to a model with more cache or a smarter internal controller (or one that takes advantage of AHCI or NQC if you have a motherboard that supports them) would help you achieve actual performance gains.

EDIT: I should add that AHCI and NQC are not guaranteed performance enhancers and in some situations can actually hurt performance.

The only thing that seems to guarantee hard disk performance gains across the board are spin rate increases, adding more drives to a RAID0 (or RAID5) or increasing the cache of the hard disk.

[@?,*???&?]

Yes. Partition it. Your performance will be improved.

I go with 30 to 50 GB chunks. If you're high-resolution, then double those numbers.

[Marc Alan Goodman]

The performance gains you stand to make by doing this are extremely minimal and this is not a known best practice for any kind of high performance computing. I work corporate IT for a large entertainment company that handles extremely high end 3D rendering and we don't do anything like this.

Upgrading your drive to a model with more cache or a smarter internal controller (or one that takes advantage of AHCI or NQC if you have a motherboard that supports them) would help you achieve actual performance gains.

EDIT: I should add that AHCI and NQC are not guaranteed performance enhancers and in some situations can actually hurt performance.

The only thing that seems to guarantee hard disk performance gains across the board are spin rate increases, adding more drives to a RAID0 (or RAID5) or increasing the cache of the hard disk.

Yes. Partition it. Your performance will be improved.

I go with 30 to 50 GB chunks. If you're high-resolution, then double those numbers.

how did those two posts just happen next to each other?

Really, I'd back up Kingmetal on this one. As far as raid0 systems go how big of a performance increase do you usually see?

[/quote]

[kingmetal]

aww you're just backing me up because I said more acronyms.

seriously though, you will not notice performance gains.

As for RAID0 the performance gains will be... negligible!

For what we're doing anyway. I should've made that more clear: RAID0 or 5 are useful in certain situations (some of which we deal with here at work), but for most desktop stuff and even the stuff we do you're likely to not see any performance increase (only a higher failure rate in the case of RAID0).

Check this article out: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdo ... i=2101&p=1

[TimOBrien]

What you DONT want to do is set up a situation where the drive heads are jumping back and forth across partitions.
(For example, sample libraries on one partition and audio projects on another)

Physical movement is GLACIAL in computer terms and you could get yourself into a situation where the buffers overrun and you get clicks, pops, or worse dropouts of critical info.

[Marc Alan Goodman]

Yup, that's kinda what I figured. Thanks guys!