Turtlerock Forum

Hi All,

Hopefully not too difficult a question...

A want to partition my second internal HD on the G5, so that I can have a 20 gig (outer) partiton purely for any current projects that I may be working on as wll as a 140 gig (inner) partiton for Backup.

The reason I want to do this is so that I still get reasonable performance for my current project as the drive fills up.

As I understand it - As drive gets fuller, the data is stored closer to the centre, meaning less diameter at 7200rpm which equals lower data transfer rates.

Seeing as I have already managed to hit the 700gig mark once this month already, thankfully all deleted now, maintaining performance regardless of drive status is vitally important to me.

Under Disk Utility in OS X does anybody know how to determine which partition is the outer and therefore faster when creating them?

Know that this is not a computer tech support forum, Rick and Mark, but thought an answer to this could prove usefull to more than just me.

PS - And Yes I know this would never happen if I used a purely anologue recording method etc etc, for all you smarty pants out there.

Hey there Smash

There's a lot that goes on between the physical disk read and the application's performance - that's not to say that there's nothing you can do to improve performance, but the key is to find out the bottleneck in the information flow and work on that - the physical disk read time is rarely the problem. Throwing RAM at a performance problem can be worthwhile up to a point, but we're not talking that here, we're tweaking only.

From my understanding of the G5 architecture, for example, there's a single serial controller for all input/output devices, including the ATA drives, USB and firewire buses, etc. On this basis, I'm guessing the most efficient tweak would be to have both program files and "current" data on the one disk in as small a partition as possible (which also cuts down the allocation block size and is therefore more efficient in using the space). The actual physical disk location of this partition is less important than the colocation of program and data in the one partition.

Good luck with it.

Chris

the first partition is the outer part