Should i partition the boot drive to maximize Logic performance?

I'm about to receive my Mac Pro 3ghz, 8 gig RAM.
I bought 3 x 10,000rpm raptor drives, and one Apple 250 gig drive.
After speaking with Applecare, I've decided to RAID the 3 drives, and use them for audio and sample streaming.
I'll use the apple drive for the OS. I decided to do this because Applecare said that the hard drive speed isn't very relevant for running the OS and applications. RAM is the main issue there. Hard disk speed comes into play when accessing and writing files. So using the RAID for samples and audio, while using the 7200rpm drive for the OS will be the optimal config.
Soooo, that leaves me with a 250 gig drive for the OS. Obviously, that leaves me with a great deal of extra space. I'll need to back up the files on the RAID drives frequently, so i'm planning to store the backups on the OS drive.
Should i simply save the files on the drive, or would it help Logic's performance to partition the drive, keeping the
OS seperate from the backup files? Or would partitioning hurt Logic and general OS operations?

In theory partioning the drive and putting the OS on the first partion will keep the OS files in the drives fastest region, even if fragmented.
You can then use the second partition for backups and if the need arises erase and clean install the OS partition.
It freaks me out however, and if i had the choice and money i'd definately go for a phisically seperate (internal) harddisk for backups.

Similar Messages

Partitioning the boot drive without wiping it clean

Hey all,
I was wondering if it is possible to partition the boot drive (in my case, the only drive - running a mid-2012 MBP) without wiping it clean during the process. Basically, I need a small (50/500GB) partition that I can install Fedora on so I can use my Linux dev tools while away from home.
I've seen information that says a couple things, which are either conflicting or very ambiguous as to the results.
a) I've read that Fedora can be installed via Bootcamp through use of Bootcamp's partitioning, but Bootcamp Assistant won't allow me to make a partition without a Win7 install disk. Is this a component that was removed through a version?
b) I've seen answers on here that state that partition w/o wipe works if the new partition is created using the default filestructs (Mac OS X Extended or w/e), but doesn't go into much detail after that. Are we talking Disk Utility here?
If b) is true, then can someone confirm that? This is a computer I use for work, so I'd rather not end up with a complete brick for the next few days.

@blasthash:
It's interesting to see VikingOSX' suggestion, because I'm in the process of adding a LM OS to my MBPro, so I'm going to check out VB . . . . I've done a dual boot set up before using rEFIt as boot manager, which now apparently doesn't work with Mtn Lion . . . it's now rEFInd . . . so having to figure that one out. Viking's suggestion might indeed be safer, the problem with that is then the Linux system is "virtual" rather than the boot system . . . which uses memory. In my case I only have 4GB on my MBPro.
It's very easy to partition the HD using DU . . . select the HD in the left side DU window, click the >partitions tab and select the number of partitions you want, and >click apply . . . viola . . . HD is partitioned . . . . The original boot system remains intact, and you can install or do what you will with the other partitions--the size of them is by dragging the "borders" to the size you want.
That's the easy part--of course you should do a cloned back up before you do anything--the Linux install part you could look at rEFInd's support page or search "rodbooks" and find his dual boot instructions. I did that with my dual boot set up -- using Bootcamp -- which went OK until I wanted to get a third partition, but Bootcamp had locked the HD . . . so I had to wipe the HD to get my now dual boot 10.6.8 & 10.8.5? system set up with a third partition set as "Freespace" . . . ready for a Linux OS install . . . using DU this time.
So, VikingOSX's advice is probably the easiest, possibly the safest . . . but it depends on using a lot of memory . . . it's like "Classic" . . . "you're in 10, but you're in 9" . . . as an old hippie guy said to me when I got my first G4 . . . . You'd be running Fedora within OSX and there ****might**** be a speed differential. Booted up as the root system Linux is pretty fast . . . gltichy, but fast. It takes a bit of work to get the boot manager rEFInd set up, but once that's done the installation into "Largest freespace" is usually pretty easy, I 've done a lot of Linux installs now and I mostly use the "automatic" option and let the system set it up. Point being, the other way, the dual boot "dark side" way is a tad more complicated, but more fun.
It just depends on whether you just need to do a "few things every now and again in Linux" . . . or whether you want to be able to run the full capacity of your machine using Linux . . . . Up to you . . . OSX probably still remains the best OS, but because Linux isn't perfect, it's "interesting" . . . to DIYers.
e.e.p.

Should I swap the boot drive?

Hi
I just bought a 2.8 that comes standard with a 320 drive
i checked it out and its a WD cavier se which has 8mb cache
I bought 3 1 tb seagate drives for the other bays
my question is as far as performance is the caviar drive to slow?
I have thought about the raptor but the size is too small I have a lot of applications,
any recommendations?

not knowing what you need the speed for it's impossible to say if it's too slow. Of course you can go out and find the fastest drive possible and change it out, but for most folks it would be just fine. You may not need all 320gb for your startup, so one option is to clone your startup to another drive, then boot from that and wipe the 320 gig drive and partition it so it is only using the the first half of the drive. That would speed things up a bit. The other part of the drive might be used to backup a portion of another drive or some other use where disk access did not compete with day to day boot-drive functions.

I am setting up Time Machine on 2 computers which will use the same external network drive. Should I partition the ext drive

Should the dirve on a networked external drive be partitioned to support the use of Time Machine on 2 Macs that are on the Network. The disk is a 2 Gig Drive and I would like to use some of the disk for external shared storage.

You are aware that there are problems with using NAS drive for Time Machine?
http://trick77.com/2011/07/15/about-os-x-lion-nas-time-machine-compatibility-net atalk-gpl-violations/
Allan

Cloning TC backups to external HD with data on it already - should i partition the HD? How to do this safely?

hi. i found a discussion directing how to clone backups onto a HD for proper backup transfer. what it didn't anwer for me, was something else. i have data on the HD i am trying to use as a temp destination for my TC backups. Should i partition the destination drive and have my old data on one volume - TC backup on the other? please help if you could with instructions on how to do it safely without distroying my data! THANKS A BUNCH!
OS mountain lion, 1st gen TC, 500gb, destination HD - WD passport for mac, 1tb.

Yes. Time Machine works better if it is in total control of its storage space.
Of course partitioning the drive in a Time Capsule is only possible by removing it and doing the partitioning on another computer.
If this were mine I would get another external drive and connect that to the Time Capsule. Move your data to the new external and allow Time Machine to use the whole internal drive in the Time Capsule instead.
Allan

Is the spotlight index stored on the boot drive or individual volumes?

Hello!
My questions are pretty simple, and are sumarized here (from the block of text below):
First, if I have several external hard drives, is the Spotlight index file for each drive stored on the external hard drive, or on OS X's boot drive?
Secondly, if it's stored on the boot drive, can I copy these files to another Tiger-running Mac to eliminate the need to re-index the hard drives? Where do I find them?
Third: Leopard's Spotlight has quite a few new features. Even if the Tiger index files are stored on the external drive, will it need to re-index the drive to support the new feature set?
Now for the long explenation:
I have been preparing to upgrade my Powerbook to Leopard within the next month or two, and as such, I bought a new hard drive to dedicate one of my old drives to Leopard and Time Machine. Because I have three extrernal hard drives, I needed to move about 500 GB of data between the thee drives to make room for what was on the now-dedicated drive. Of course, this requires that Spotlight re-index the "new" drives.
Today, I left all of the drives attached to my old G4, running Tiger, while it sits there indexing the three drives, totaling around a terrabyte of external storage. Because Spotlight tends to hog all of the available CPU time, and the G4 should be done indexing the drives, it would save me a lot of time if I could copy the index files over from the G4 to my Powerbook to avoid indexing them all over again. That is, if the index files are not on the external drives already. If they are on the G4's boot drive, where do I find these files?
Finally, I plan to reformat the internal hard drive of my Powerbook when I install Leopard - I make a habit of doing a fresh install for every major upgrade (eg, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, etc). To estimate the amount of time needed to upgrade, I'd be nice to know if Leopard will need to re-index the files on the external drives - even if Tiger's spotlight index is stored on the externals - for Leopard's new Spotlight features. Will it need to re-index? I would assume that until Leopard arrives, most people wouldn't know this, of course.
Thanks a bunch,
-Dan

Each drive's Spotlight index is located on that drive.
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How do I Partition Yosemite Boot Drive Using BCA?

I replaced the HD in my Mid 2010 27" IMac to achieve greater storage. The replacement went fine with no issues, and I then installed Yosemite (10.10.1) from scratch using the latest version of Diskmaker and installing the install version of Yosemite on to a USB thumb drive. The replacement drive is a 4.0Gb drive with no prior installations on it.
Everything has gone fine, and OSX Yosemite seemingly works great.
But I need to install Boot Camp and a fresh version of Windows 7, 64bit SP1, and it just won't work at the partition step before I ever get to the Windows installation.
When I use BCA I downloaded the drivers without a hitch, but when I go to the next step I encounter the error message, "The startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition. The startup disk must be formatted as a single Mac OS extended volume or already partitioned by Boot camp Assistant for installing Windows".
I have found a number of references to this error message, but none seem to describe my situation with a new, clean, install of Mavericks.
I have a bootable backup (via Carbon Copy Cloner), and have loaded current Yosemite compatible versions of Partition Magic and TechTools onto the external bootable drive, but cannot see any problems with the drive.
Before I progress any further with installing apps on to the new drive and I still have a clean Yosemite installation on the new HD, I want to resolve the issue since Windows 7 via Boot Camp (and not via virtual software!) is essential. The prior smaller HD had a Windows 7 Boot Camp installation that worked fine.
Options that might work:
1. Boot to the external drive, and create an MS-DOS partition manually using Disk Utilities, and then try to use that partition for Windows using BCA.
2. Use low level partitioning software or terminal mode to erase the small hidden OSX restore partition, which may be why BCA thinks I have more than one partition on the boot drive. This notion shows up in some of the threads on this web site, but why would Apple allow this problem since all installations of Yosemite presumably have the hidden restore partition?
3. My new 4Gb hard drive is a hybrid SSD/HD (ST4000DX001), but this type of drive seems to be the norm now, and I do not see where this would be a problem.
4. Erase the new drive, and install a clean version of the original OSX, (Lion, I believe for the mid 2010 27" IMac) using the internet and the Cmd-R command, subsequently updating the original OSX version to Yosemite after creating a Boot Camp partition (although I don't know if BCA would work from the original version of OSX for this machine. I really don't want to do this because of the time required for the internet download, but it would take me to the original OSX image which came with the machine.
I have no issues with my Yosemite installation, and backup is not a problem since my goal was to create a clean installation of OSX uncluttered with legacy apps.
I would be grateful for any experienced suggestions, or hypotheses as to the nature of the problem.
Thanks!!!!

You can use an external disk for store files and for Time Machine, but you have to create a second volume.
To create volumes on the external disk, use Disk Utility. See > http://pondini.org/OSX/DU3.html I recommend you to put as much space as you can for the Time Machine volume, because backups consume a lot and Time Machine starts deleting backups when the external disk is full

Don't have correct permissions to any drive other than the boot drive

I installed SL, and when it came time to enter in the user name, it said the name was already taken xxxx and so I entered yyyy. As an example.
Now User yyyy has Read / Write permissions for everything on Drive 1, the boot drive, but ALL of the other hard drives have xxxx as having Read / Write permissions, and not for my new account yyyy. So everytime I need to write a file to a hard drive, I have to fix permission for the folder the file resides in. This is getting old fast.
How can I change all my drives, folders, files, etc, etc to have yyyy permissions added without doing them 1 at a time?

what kind of backups? manual ones? then it's ok to do the following
select a drive and enter command+i. in the resulting popup, unlock the lock at the bottom, change the permissions as you want, then click on the "gears" action button at the bottom and select "apply to enclosed items".
However, let me stress here that you should NEVER EVER use "apply to enclosed items" on ANY system created folders, system drives or TM drives. that includes btw things like your home folder, your desktop folder etc. use it ONLY on folders you made yourself. using it on a system drive will have catastrophic results. using it on any system created folder will likely have highly unpleasant ones because such folders often have invisible ACLs and using this button will propagate them inside.

If I want to install Lions on a 2nd hard drive in my MacPro Desktop, will it allow me to do so if I have Leopard installed on the boot drive?

I have a blank 2nd hard drive that I am going to install in my MacPro desktop. The boot drive already contains the Leopard operating system. I want to install Lions on the blank hard drive. Will setup in Lions when it comes out, allow me to install Lions onto the 2nd hard drive since it should detect that I have a valid Apple operating system on the boot drive?

You can first install Snow Leopard then re-download Lion. Or you saved the original installer application then created a bootable Lion installer on a USB flash drive or DVD. Or you buy Apple's $69.00 USB flash installer.
You haven't told us what hindrances you've encountered, so you should post your own separate topic related to your problem and not threadjack another person's topic.

How to partition the hard drive in Mac OS 9?

I have a 366 MHz iBook Clamshell, and to install Yellow Dog Linux without wiping OS 9, I must partition the hard drive. It does not have any CD tray, and the hard drive is 10 GB.

If you are trying to partition the disk you are booting from, then no, it cannot alter it's partition map while booted. You will have to use some alternative boot device (ordinarily this would be a bootable CD, but you'll need to find some workaround like an external device).
Also, the utilities in OS 9 will only repartition that drive by erasing the whole thing. You will need to boot into a Linux OS with one of the Linux partition tools if you want to non-destructively alter that discs partition table (use something like GParted on a bootable UBuntu disc or something like that).

Adding a 2nd HD, and making it the boot drive.

Hi Folks. This may come out rather lengthy, but there's a lot of information bedhind why I'm looking for a specific solution. I just bought a second drive (Maxtor DiamondMax 11 400GB hard drive with 16mb buffer), which should arrive next week. I will be installing it into a PowerMac G5 dual 2.5ghz, with 3GB RAM and an original 250GB hard drive. Since I got the computer, I've had consistant problems with many programs, especially with iLife '06 (specifically Garageband, which is supper buggy, and iPhoto which will not import photos). I have upgraded from '05, since the problems started there, but I've had the same problems and moreso, even after fully reinstalling the OS once (I run 10.3.9). There are other little goofy quirks, too (superdrive communication, Safari, system preference configuration, etc.), and after spending many hours on the phone with tech support, and on the messagboards, I can confirm that I seem to be the only one with all of these problems. I believe that I have a problematic hard drive, and I am interested in installing OSX onto this new hard drive and then transferring all of my files to it manually, then wiping the old drive. I am not interested in doing a Carbon Copy, since I've had so many problems with all the software, that I just want to start from scratch. A nice clean install.
So, my questions are, how can I:
1. Effectively format and install a new stable version of OSX onto the second hard drive?
2. Switch the second drive to be the boot drive, and manually transfer the file data from the old drive to the new drive?
3. Erase the old drive and use it for data? I would also be interested in effective ways to test the drive to see if it is defective.
And finally, just because I'm already asking questions, the best way to get Apple to replace the drive, if indeed it tests as defective.
If any of ya'll can help me put a plan together, then when my second hard drive comes next week, I will know exactly how to bring it all together without screwing anything up.
Thanks in advance,
Ben
PowerMac G5 Dual 2.5Ghz Mac OS X (10.3.9) 3GB RAM, 250GB hard drive

"1. Effectively format and install a new stable version of OSX onto the second hard drive?"
Boot from the OS X install DVD and install it.
"2. Switch the second drive to be the boot drive, and manually transfer the file data from the old drive to the new drive?"
It will be chosen automatically after the install. Otherwise: System Preferences --> Startup Disk
"3. Erase the old drive and use it for data? I would also be interested in effective ways to test the drive to see if it is defective."
Applications --> Utilities --> Disk Utility

Is there any value in partitioning the system drive?

I've always set up my computer with a system drive for the OS and Programs and then a RAID 0 for video capture.
However, I found this link which suggests that it might be better to partition the "system drive" for better performance. Does anybody partition, their system drive?
http://partition.radified.com/partitioning_2.htm
John Rich

NO !!!
One physical drive has one set of read/write heads
When you partition a drive, that one set of read/write heads now has to do double the work to navigate two areas
The only time you might want to partition a drive is to have a dual boot... and then each OS is completely separate from the other and that set of read/write heads is still only working in one space

Which drive is the boot drive?

I installed a 2nd hard drive in my G4 dual 1ghz sometime around 2001. I'm now on a G5 and would like to pull the 2nd drive from the G4 and put it in a firewire enclosure to use with the G5. How can I tell which drive is the boot drive and which is the secondary drive? I kind of remember that the 2nd drive went in the lower bay but I'm not 100% sure. Any other caveats to pulling out this drive? Thanks in advance.
Power Mac dual 1ghz

The system profiler should tell you the serial number of the hard drive, or type of hard drive when you select it in the IDE bus. Compare that with the label on the drive itself.
Both bays can have boot drives, though typically master jumper drives are better able to boot than slaves on certain operating systems.
You can tell the existing boot drive, because it is the first drive that appears in the upper right hand corner of the desktop if you view and arrange the desktop by kind.
If you just want to transfer data over from a G4 to a G5, you may want to use Target Disk Mode:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583
Note, if the G4 is the kind that can boot into Mac OS 9, set it as the Target machine. In addition, if it is running 10.2.2 or earlier it should be the target machine, because 10.2.2 and earlier don't understand the Journaled operating system which may be installed on your G5.

Should I partition a new drive?

Hi,
I just purchased a new 1TB drive for my G5. I have a 200GB in the first bay for the OS and Apps. My question is, is there a technical reason why I would partition the new drive? The only things I've found online (albeit breifly researching) is that it is useful for multiple boot systems (which I don't care about), keeping the OS seperate from the data incase of an OS failure (surely a Windows thing, but again, not a problem as my OS is on a seperate drive), and finally, to help keep things organised (one partition for music, one for photos, etc), which I also have no interest in.
I could not see any information about a technical or performance based reason wy I might want to partition the drive.
Can any one shed any light?
Thanks,
C.

I would never live on a Mac without an emergency boot drive or partition, a backup of my working system, AND keep 10.4.9 around while still using 10.4.10 (a fall back).
That is how much (or little) I trust OS X, and what I know of the problems that even a 'little' security update havoc you can run into.
Backups can be sparse disk images as well as a regular volume (or "partition").
Because files can get scattered all over a drive; you want to use the outer 1/3 for performance; you don't want to have to backup all the contents of 900GB drive; you want to use some of it for static files, archived, that aren't used but need to be stored somewhere.

What needs to be on the boot drive?

My dual 2 GHz G5 has two Maxtor 160 GB internal drives (model 6B160M0 to be exact).
As my boot drive gets fuller (it's now 60% full), everything appears to slow down.
I'm thinking about paring down what's on the boot drive, and moving everything else to the second drive (right now, it just holds MP3s).
What MUST be on the boot drive, and what can safely be moved to the other drive?
Thanks...

Page in/outs were 109776/2131; at this point CPU
usage is 95% idle; disk activity shows reads in as
1339238 and writes out as 86684.
It's the pagouts per second that's important. A few
per second is fine, 100 per second is far too much.
I changed the update frequency to 1 second. The page outs, no matter what I did, remained 0.
For disk activity, look at Mbytes per second, read
and write. If it's staying around 20 Mbytes per
second, you are being limited by the drive. If that
is the case, you should add a drive and arrange your
tasks so that both are used at once. If you can't do
that, you could use RAID, but that is a lot more
complicated.
The Mbytes/second, read and write, never came close to 20 Mbytes.
Thanks...

Should i partition the boot drive to maximize Logic performance?

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