Do I partition the external hard drive?

[jelderfield]

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OK - so I did search for this and couldn't find a good answer. I just purchased a 600GB LaCie external hard drive for backups. I'm in the process of formating it and I need help in deciding how many volumes to partition it into. Do I need more than 1 partition? My basic use for the whole thing will be for M8 files - raw, tiffs, and jpegs. I'd appreciate any suggestions - I'd like to do this right the first time! Thanks.

http://www.jefoto.com

[BerndReini]

I read somewhere that it could be a good idea to make a partition that is 4.5gb (the capacity of a single layer DVD). This way, whenever you download anything to this partition, it will fill up at 4.5gb, at which point you can then transfer everything to the larger partition as well as burn a backup DVD of your important picture files. Seems like a good idea to keep you updated on hardcopy backups.

[johnjs]

There's a few RAID and storage experts here who might have a different take on it, but my suggestion is to just go with one partition. I can see the utility of seperate partitions on a drive with an OS, that way if the system crashes you can reformat and still have your data unaffected. I leave my LaCie 250 external powered off all the time until I need it as well.

 

best-John

[DaveEP]

All my large external HDDs have a single partition. My largest is a Seagate 750GB. I hate running out of space in a partition knowing that there is still room on the same physical HDD in another partition, and I always ended up wishing I had not divided it up, so now I don't !!

[dugby]

To summarise 25 years of storage experience.....

 

1. 'Best Storage Practices 100' .....keep 3 copies in separate locations.

 

2. 'Best Storage Practices 200' .....keep 3 copies in separate locations.

 

3. 'Best Storage Practices 300' .....migrate it all to new media and resume step 1.

[wparsonsgisnet]

Jonathan, all my drives have a single partition.

 

The advantage to partitioning is that you might get smaller sectors and files smaller than the sector size would then waste less disk space. Such files would be word processing documents, for example.

 

The disadvantage (to me) is that it's a giant pain in the butt to keep changing surfaces, and there is also the need to worry more often about running out of space.

 

I also happen to have some very large files because I do video work. The intermediate, rendered file is usually 300 or so GB.

[sparkie]

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Partioning a drive is good practice for the following reasons:

 

1. The seek times are faster on smaller partitions rather than one huge volume. Read and writes also improve

 

2. You can organise you work files in physical partitions rather than folders. I have my 500gb Western digital split several partitions: Canon 1DMKII, Leica M8, Misc

 

Note, if a drive fails it generally effects the whole drive and not always isolated by partition

[wparsonsgisnet]

Sparkie,

 

The LaCie drives have an 8 MB cache.

 

Are the seeks faster in both cases, when the file is bigger than the cache, and when the file is smaller than the cache.

 

If I'm reading or writing an M8 dng (10.x MB), what is the effect?

 

Mind you, I'm still using a single partition because it fits my mindspace better, but I'm curious about your first statement.

 

tnx,

[bill vann]

i use multiple externals and no longer partition them.

 

i don't keep my machine up all the time and i don't run all the externals all the time and i had several issues with programs trying to find data it thought was on one drive but because additional drives were on for various reasons.

 

i work on my internal drives and do back ups on multiple externals and also utilize one external as a work drive so it always powers up with my machine.

 

bill

[john_nyc]

Back in the day when I was backing up to cdrom and my largest drives were only 9gb I used to partition them in 650mb slices.

 

It's been some time since I've done anything other than a single partition per drive, except my system drive for multi-OS purposes.

 

You do gain smaller sectors (and less lost usable space) and theoretically faster seek times, but I think with today's huge drives with 16MB caches neither really makes too much of a practical difference.

 

For segregation purposes I just use seperate physical drives (media/photos/games/OS on each on their own drives).

 

John

[sparkie]

Hi Bill

 

I'm not sure about the Lacie drives, there are many with different specs. But generally seek times are greatly improved when the drive has a smaller volume to search and perform functions. Its faster to work on just a 150gb partition rather than an entire 600gb single dirve voume that hasn't been split.

 

One other advantage to partioning (at least on the Mac OSX) is that you can boot off any particular partition with a bootable OSX for back up/maintenance/emergency situations – acting like several physical external drives.

 

For your purposes Bill a single volume is better, but its all relative to your overall drive capacity. If you had a 10 TB drive (!) say then it would make sense to partition an enormous drive like that into 2 or 3 smaller partitions for your sizeable 300gb video files. If on the other hand you only had a 1TB drive then its not worth the hassle as the size to speed gain wouldn't be evident.

 

With the massive files you are working on do you have a RAID set-up? – this is the best for video work, read/write times are greatly improved and you can set your RAID to different levels depending on the drive to mirror, failsafe etc.. and if you are real serious get a hot-swappable RAID

 

read here for more info about partitioning..

 

Best practices for partitioning a hard disk

 

Hard drive partition performance can be improved with good disk partition manage: introduction into hard drive partitioning

[wparsonsgisnet]

Sparkie, I don't do RAID. The really big files are only intermediate renders that are leter deleted.

 

My backup is to have two drives with the directory for my digipix on them, and a 3rd drive with the same backup, offsite (in the detached garage, in a fireproof box).

 

For video, I have the original tape, of course, and a copy of the processed files (they follow the intermediate render) that are used to generate the DVD's. A copy of these is also on a different drive in the box in the garage.

 

I ave also started keeping a second copy of my processed pix, those in the Images directory that C1 likes. I also point PS to that directory to make life simple.

 

Man, this photography turning into computers is a drag, isn't it?

[Guest sirvine]

I like the idea of having a staging partition the same size as a DVD so that you can fill it until it's time to burn a third backup.

[wparsonsgisnet]

Jonathan, this thread must be making your decision a *w-h-o-l-e* lot easier.

[rwfreund]

Dont bother to divide the drive into small partitions.

It is hell to change your mind.

Just format it to one partition and use the directory structure to sub-divide things.

For reference, some representative 7200 RPM drives max out at an average transfer rate of around 78MB per second which is faster than USB2 or Firewire 400 can support.

If you want relly fast, then go for internal drives and RAID 0.

I use RAID 5 spread over three drives with a hot spare for my data and raid 1 for my system volume sharing the same hot spare.

I treat the external drive as a slow backup medium only a little faster than my 70GB DAT tape drive. That drive was once large, but now seems sooo small.

-bob

[ChrisC]

Hell's teeth, I truly wish I could follow and learn from what you guys are on about. The trouble is I was lost after 'do I'.

 

....................Chris

[wparsonsgisnet]

Yeah, partitioning is for rebels.

[jelderfield]

Thanks for all the replies. I went with just the 1 volume - seems easier in my mind. I moved all my "photos" data over this morning - only about 100gb so far - and most of it is scans - so I have the orginal negs and slides, etc. I will probably buy a second lacie 600gb and I'll be set for 3 copies of the M8 data.

 

FYI - just got back from hanging my show which opens at the CUE Art foundation tomorrow - and I'm stoked!!! All best and thanks again.

http://www.jefoto.com

[nryn]

Improved seek time on partitioned drives is subject to a lot of debate. If there's performance increase (big if--in some cases partitioning decreases performance), it's nominal at best and for photographers, probably doesn't mean a lick of difference.

 

I can say this: every single time I've partitioned a drive I've had to move all that data off, make one partition or the other bigger, then move it all back.

 

If you have a single use for the data on that drive, and it sounds like you do, why bother partitioning it at all? It doesn't help with backup (same drive). If you have to keep data separated for some reason, just get another drive.

 

These days, a mid-sized hard drive is the same cost as a handful of Leica brand lens hoods, a cost just about everyone talking about where to store their M8 files should be able to handle.

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[losta]

The only reason I would do it now is is I need to clone a hard drive or several hard drives, where you know you would only need a specific size. But in general why bother? You will fill up a partition and have to move to another one. Hard drives are cheap enough now I don't think it's worth the bother and potential trouble.