how to use my new hd

Hi

i bought a 160 GB hd. its connected to my laptop through firewire... now how should i use it? how many partitions should i make, and how should i use each one?

what use is left to my internal disk?

i use reason with a bunch of refills (practically all those you can find in the web for free ) and cubase. Of course the audio goes to cubase and most sounds come from reason, but i have b4, and pro 53 too.

so where to put.

1. recorded audio

2. samples

3. synth presets

4. refills

5. personal files

I'd make 3-4 partitions, and use them for all your audio.

You can use the unused space on your system drive for backup, which you should be religious about. Nothing worse than learning the hard way why backup is so crutial.

I would avoid partitions-they don't really provide any advantage today like they did a few years ago. I keep a consistent and reliable folder structure on my drives which I keep consistent and clean as possible. Also, keep in mind that if you do go with a partitioned drive, you don't get any more throughput out of it, and can actualy make the computer work harder, especially if you're linking back to your samples and loops.

The idea about backup is a really good one. whenever I finish a project, and sometimes during, I do a save session copy and copy all audio files etc over to another HD and leave it just in case.

I would strongly recommend getting a drive that is dedicated to saving your samples and loops. If you are using firewire, I highly recommend Rocstor drives, I use them every day and they perform well. Teh case is fanless, but it still gets great heat dissipation with a completely aluminum case. bast part is the price= $140 fro a 160g drive.

my.02

-Todd A.

Absolutely 100% false. Partitions provide safety barriers so that if there is corruption on 1 partion it doesn't affect the data on the entire drive. In addition partitioning allows faster access to data, speeding up file reading.

On smaller drives (40gb and under) they are not significantly helpful, but on a drive this size they will be a major asset.

Proper drive management and backup negates all the advantages of partitioning. Besides corruption of one sector still requires an full initialization to be 100% solid again (to be safe). I have seen many people with major problems with partitioning when I was a Protools consultant. I'm talking in a real-world type of manner, not a theoretical one. The biggest mistake i saw was people trying to get more throughput out of the drive, another would be filling the drive too full.

Here's the other Rub- You really only want to fill a FW drive to 60% capacity. That's not a hard number, but it's a number that I have found to be the most reliable- it's like a conservative guideline or safety margin. I've foiund that in my 15 years of working with DAWS that 90% of the problems with hard drives occur because they are too full. I've found the best way to avoid file corruption is to avoid disc repair (an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure...)

My .02

-Todd A.