The Logic Off Topic list

Frank Valet wrote:
>Hi! I'm intending to buy an external Firewire Harddisk Drive from
>IceCube(Case), they're using IBM drives, 80gb, 7200 rpm, for my g3
>Powerbook, Mac os 9.1. What seems good about them: they come without a fan,
>the power stuff is located outside the "case", so I guess they're quite
>silent. And there price seems reasonable.
>First question: any other suggestions?

IBM drives are fast -- I have several. It is wqrth knowing that there have
been some problems with recent generations of them -- not the latest as far
as I know so they may be fine. IBM has advised that its ATA  drives aren't
for 24/7 use suggesting a limit of 300 odd hours a month. In fact they are
even getting out of selling drives -- their hard drive division has been
sold to Hitachi lately.

>Second: I thought about three partitions: 20 gigs for exs Samples, 20 gigs
>for temporarily Backups, and 40 gigs for recording, editing, playback etc.
>Is that a reasonable idea?

>--> Is it important to position the partitions in a certain way, to achieve
>best possible performance, i.e. the recording partition has to come first or
>something?

Yep. The first partition is at the outside and is the fastest. Those IBM
7200s deliver about half the throughput from the innermost sections. So it
is best to put your backups in the last partition and assign the audio
recording to the first partition. Bear in mind that it probably isn't a
good idea to have backups of files on other parts of the same drive -- if
it fails you will lose them all. 

 If you are only going to load the EXS24 samples and not scroll them from
the disk then disk speed is not critical. Using firewire, the throughput
permitted by the interface is lower than that delivered by a regular ATA
controller so the falloff in speedas you move towared the inner sectors is
problably less of an issue for current Firewire applications.

Partitioning on a Mac I can't advise you on.

Regards,
Murray