[MacDV] Re: Formatting my hard drive

[Mark M. Florida]

I would have to completely disagree...  For any kind of media work 
which involves CONSTANT writing, deleting, rewriting to a disk, a 
dedicated disk or partition will make everything run SOOO much smoother 
as time goes on -- especially on OS X systems with their 500,000 tiny 
files for the system and apps.  And what's the advantage of doing video 
capture to a journalled file system?  Journalling is nice for regular 
usage, but slows things down a bit -- if you have a super-fast G4 or a 
G5, it's probably not a big problem, but I think even Apple recommends 
against doing video capture to a journalled disk.  And what to do you 
mean by "RAID protection" if you mean RAID 1 (mirrored), this is yet 
another way to slow down the performance of your hard drives -- the 
same data has to be written TWICE (once to each disk).  RAID 0 is 
actually the way to go for fast performance, but cuts your data 
integrity down for each disk you ad to the RAID set (the more disks in 
a RAID 0 array, the more chance you have of losing data due to a disk 
failure).  If you're working with video and your drive craps out, you 
just have to re-capture the video (keep copies of the project files on 
a separate drive if you're worried about drive failure).  About 
organization -- what's wrong with that?  If it helps you work better, 
then do it.

Another 2 cents.

- Mark

On Dec 3, 2003, at 5:07 AM, Peter van der Linden wrote:

> Partitions were useful when disks were much smaller, and we needed to 
> separate out the fixed size stuff from the variable sized stuff.  
> Nowadays there is much less justification for using multiple 
> partitions.  The right disk technology is one or two partitions, 
> journalled filesystems, and RAID protection.  Anything else is just 
> organization for its own sake.