[MacDV] Re: Formatting my hard drive

[Peter van der Linden]

On Dec 3, 2003, at 8:28 AM, Mark M. Florida wrote:

> People who do heavy Photoshop work (huge files that hit the scratch 
> disk a lot) should also think about creating an entirely separate 
> "scratch" partition to use exclusively as a Photoshop scratch disk - 
> between 4 and 8 GB, depending on how big your files are -- it REALLY 
> speeds up scratch disk usage to not have to compete with the 
> gazillions of system and application files that reside on the startup 
> disk.

I don't understand why you believe these system and application files 
are somehow magically "not competing" with the scratch files just by 
moving them into a separate partition.  Could you explain?   The 
slowest part of disk access is head movement, followed by rotational 
latency.  Moving things about on the same platter does nothing to 
minimize either, and may conceivably make them both worse, no matter 
how many partitions you have on one disk.

You would have to move the files into a separate disk running under a 
separate controller on a separate I/O bus to truly accomplish some 
performance improvement.

Try a benchmark of editing with everything in one partition vs. a 
separate partition.  You may surprise yourself.
Partitioning originally had two main uses: 1.  to prevent the system 
stopping when /tmp (or some other resource) filled up, and 2. to make 
backups easier.  It was never a performance enhancing tool.  
Fragmentation has not been a performance problem on modern filesystems 
for at least a decade.

Partition all you like, but don't kid yourself its doing anything for 
performance.

    Peter