[MacDV] Re: Mobile Setup

[Michael Winter]

On Tuesday, February 18, 2003, at 06:36  PM, Erica Sadun wrote:

>> Exactly. I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. As I remember they recommend not 
>> capturing to the OS disk. Michael Rubin suggests partitioning if a 
>> second drive is not available.
>
> No! No no no no no!!!! Partitioning is EEEEEEEEEVIL. As I mentioned,
> it makes the disk head do too much work. (Okay, it's not the partition
> that is evil, but running the capture program on one partition and
> writing the data on another).

OK, I'll admit my ignorance and ask why this causes any more work for 
the disk head. While capturing, isn't everything the program needs (the 
code) for the task already in memory? If so, why should it make any 
difference where the program files are located since they don't need to 
be accessed during the capture?

And just to add a data point to the main topic of the thread, I've only 
had one problem capturing video in a single drive system (one 
partition) and that was a 450 MHz iMac DV that was low on disk space 
and had never been defragged. You could really hear that drive working 
trying to keep up, until it ultimately failed. A run-through with Plus 
Optimizer to defrag the disk cured the problem though, and its been 
working great ever since.

-Mike