Partitioning Map for two Drives

[Al Poulin]

Hello Listers:

Again, I thank Mike, Alex, Randy, and Kirk for the answers to my swap space
question in thread:  "OS X  Panther Partition Size and Swap Space."

I understand from your comments that more info about my system would help.
So I'll expand a bit.

I suspect my wife and I will be using OS 9 and Classic for another year or
so.  I have a QuickSilver G4 733 which came with both OSs installed.  I
quickly upgraded to 9.2.2, all that is fine.  I played around with upgrading
10.0.4 through a couple updates of 10.1 and got disgusted.  It was not worth
the time just to have the latest X to play with.  Wasn't going to "use" it
anyway.  Panther was well worth waiting for in my mind.  Now I'm getting
serious about it.

I have two internal 40GB hard drives with 9 volumes.  That has been handy.
There is a little bit of Photoshop Elements work here with a light load of
photos.  There is no music, no movies, and no DVD.  Most of the hard drive
space is still unused.  Other than photos, the other valuable data consists
of genealogy data bases in Reunion, mail, correspondence, and archived web
pages.  The last data backup took less than two CD-ROMs.

You guys have given me the most rational arguments that I have seen so far
to avoid partitioning with OS X.  But I already have partitions set up
focused on OS 9.  I understand I may as well keep those things that way.

So for Drive One, I see 5 partitions for:

OS 9.2.2 (boot)
Scratch (for Photoshop Elements v1)
OS 9 Applications and Data
Backup for OS X Data
Test OS X (Panther and whatever comes up, emergency utilities)

For Drive Two, I would have 2 or 3 partitions for:

OS X and Classic (minimal OS 9)
Scratch (for later Photoshop Elements v2, I understand this is appropriate,
    TRUE?)
Backup for OS 9 Data

As part of this sanity check, it is best to let OS X do its own magic for
memory management and for file integrity.  Clean installs of future versions
of OS X and any maintenance on Panther do not really put at risk the
applications and data on the same volume, but we must routinely back up the
data.

I have recently seen on another e-list that having applications and data on
separate volumes of the same drive causes needless disk-thrashing (head
movement).  TRUE?  Therefore, I will recombine the OS 9 applications and
data that I now have on separate partitions of the same drive.

Your comments on all this are most welcome.

-- 
Al Poulin
Anger, hate, and revenge are for the devil, forgiveness is for God,
proactive self-defense is for the rest of us.