Re: [LAU] partition table

On 17 December 2010 23:01, rosea.grammostola
<rosea.grammostola@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> Will performance be better if you have a special partition for audio?

Yes and no. If this 'audio' partition is created with a filesystem
suitable for handling a lot of medium-sized files (samples) and
sometimes large ones (long recordings), then there is a little
improvement. For eg. on Windows, NTFS with an allocation unit size of
64K, I/O can be more reliable since access is faster than going
through 4K clusters. HFS+ can scale very well, so on a Mac I keep
everything at that. On Linux, you may benefit equally using a
filesystem such as ReiserFS, but don't quote me on this. Similarly,
your /var can use XFS, and /home EXT4. I don't know how BTRFS scales -
never used it.

With all that said, the difference is still negligible. The only real
improvement gained is from using a separate hard disk where you save
your projects, and where your audio work files like samples are
stored. Internal disks should definitely be superior, but external via
USB/FireWire still helps. The reason is obvious; your disks spin
independently.

I don't like to partition myself because I see no real benefit. I just
organise it in such a way that my 'system' partition remains
independent from the 'data' partition. As such, I only allocate a
small portion to the system, and the rest to the data. Currently on
the laptop that I have, it's like:

60 GB - NTFS, default allocation, Windows system
128 GB - NTFS, 64K allocation, shared data
40 GB - EXT4, defaults, Linux system

Don't mind the Windows, this is a borrowed machine. My own laptop had
only 1 40GB system partition and the rest of the 320GB for data, both
EXT4. I also like to symlink folders in $HOME from the data partition
(even a ~/.bin with my personal executables), so essentially I do not
use $HOME for permanent storage. I copy configs periodically to a UFD.
I never reinstall my system so I don't particularly have any need for
$HOME backups. Storing them on a UFD only serves the purpose of new
installations on different machines.

I recently got myself a WD Passport Elite 500GB, formatted it to NTFS
w/ default allocation (because 64K causes hiccups on reads via USB
from what I observe), and the r/w performance is great.

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