Thanks everyone for posting your valuable technical knowledge! An interesting debate. I have a feeling this post will be pointed to for some time to come regarding HD questions. So I'm still torn regarding if partitioning my 120 gig drive, one 30 gig for OS and editing programs and the other partition for music not being used in vid projects while using the new 250 gig for VID files is the best procedure performance wise - OR if I should avoid the partition route all together and just have the nonproject files on the original 120 gig that already has my OS and all NLE programs installed and simply move my vid files and any music to be used in a project to the new 250 gig. It sounds like it may just come to personal preference, I hope I'm right in assuming that either one of these routes should yield atleast good performance if not great especially considering previously I have been running all vid projects / OS / and NLE's on a single drive while my MP3's were on the tiny 30 gig seperate drive.

Just wanted to point out that while external firewire drives are of course not as fast as having an in-system drive, firewire is more than fast enough to handle straight throughput of live digital video.

And partitioning isn't just a relic of old systems with smaller drives. To this day partitioning is used with solid purpose. Some benefits can even be gained by having a partition just for your swap file, which is very commonly done on servers and other high end systems. It does provide gains, though having a single dedicated drive to something is always better than a partition.

Also, here are some benchmarks on internal drives vs. Firewire 800 vs. Firewire 400.

http://www.island-mac.com/barefeats/fire34.html

Kent, thanks for pointing out.

Anyway what I wanted to say is that the newer big drives are somehow faster. May be because they use higher density.

Have in mind also that the OS and programs use mostly RAM and the swap file so what we are talking in theory is not exactly true in practice.

Of coarse I don't say to partition without planning - I 'lost' many hours researching how to do it for my particular set up.

Edit: In Bryan's case I wouldn't go back using older drive to handle OS/apps and swap file.

Sorry Imran, but I disagree with some of your last post.

You should not put the swapfile in a second partition on any drive you use. This will degrade performance. Ideally, the swapfile/pagefile could be on its own drive, but you need to still maintain a portion of the pagefile on the OS drive. If you use hibernate or sleep, do not shrink your pagefile to equal or less than memory size as you may have issues during restarts (as yet, we have not found a cause for this. I probably should open a case, but it will be a real pain.)

Currently, the best, economical scheme is to have an OS/Apps drive with the pagefile located on it. With IDE, if you can go with a fast 7500rpm drive(s) or a 10k Raptor(s), the better. Fast SCSI is great too (10k, 15k). The second "drive" would be a big volume for video. I would not put the pagefile on the data drive, but with regular DV, it is not taxed too much. I use drive in quotes because it could be an array.

Partitioning of OS on servers tends to be a legacy of the earlier days were systems such as NT 3.1 and NT 3.51 would need to be fixed. In fact, FAT was used for that C: partition because there were not any tools for fixing NTFS if the system crashed. The separation protected data as you almost always had to reinstall the OS once in the server's lifetime.

Ok, so its been settled that the best thing for my project files ie. DV and music for projects is on the new seperate drive. My "Old" 120 gig drive is only a year old so it's not like extremely old hardware and it came with the top of the line dell at the time so I'm positive it's not a slower 7200 speed. The question now I pose to hopefully understand:

1. Should the old drive get a partition or not?

2. If yes, say around 30 gigs and 90 gigs, should the 30 gig partition also hold my common programs like NLE's and Microsoft suites or would it be better to keep my programs and NLE's on the other larger partition keeping the 30 gig OS specific?

Without adding another controller, I would:

Make the 120 C: as a whole drive. OS, Apps, Swap, additional workspace if you need it.

Use the 200 on the same IDE cable as "E:" (assuming the CD or DVD is "D:" - note - if you make the 200 a primary partition, it will be D:, if you make it an extended partition, it will be E: during the installation.)

You could add the 30 to the same IDE cable as the DVD, but make sure you do not write to it while burning a CD or DVD and know that it is 'slower'. Or you could retire it. But 30GB will hold about 6 full DVD images or three hours worth of DV files.

George - sounds like a plan - as for the 30 gigger, I actually have one DVD drive and then a CD burner on the other. Until I end up getting a DVD /CD burner all in one in the next year or so, I'll need both these drives so I think the 30 gig will take a little rest for a while. When it comes a time that I need a portable drive for bringing projects back and forth between locations, it may serve as my first Firewire case drive. Again, thanks everyone for all your invaluable knowledge on the subject, I'm sure this post will be valuable to many other users with HD questions....