should i partition my macbook's hard drive for field audio recording?

Tim Young

Tim Young

Active member
hi everyone-

i'm planning on buying a macbook and using boomrecorder and a firewire sound card to record separate sound for short films. will it be beneficial to partition the hard disk and record all of the audio to a separate partition from the main system one? i've done partitioning with PC, because i heard that placing large data files on the same hard disk as the one containing the OS and programs and then removing them causes fragmenting of the hard drive and decreases system performance. is this true? or did it used to be true, but is no longer an issue, or is not an issue with macs?

i could use an external HD, but want to keep it as compact as possible. thanks for the help!
 
I would seriously consider using an external mirrored disk array for something that important. You can get the WD My Book Pro 1TB (which has 2x500gb drives) and create a 500gb mirrored disk array for about $350. If you lose a day or two's worth of audio, you will be completely fired.
 
saneproductions said:
you will be completely fired.
Click to expand...
Not just fired... completely fired! Haha!

I second Mike's advice, go with external; and even better, external mirrored raid.

I would never write audio to the same disk as my OS was on, no matter how fast the system is. There's all sorts of issues relating to it other than just file fragmenting.
 
Yep, partitioning doesn't really do anything relative to improving performance - you're still writing to the same physical drive. The only way to improve performance is to write to a different physical drive.

Not sure why you're planning to use a firewire card - the MacBook has FW built in. What you do need is a mixer or interface of some sort that has a FW out capability. Many use the Motu Traveler with Boom Recorder. I use the Alesis FW 16.

Phil
 
A firewire sound card is what the MOTU, etc. are, and they work great. If you store a large file and then delete it from any partition you cause fragmentation. A simple de-frag usually eliminates any of those kinds of problems. A seperate partition is a good idea as you can reformat each partition individually without affecting the other ones. As far as using an external harddrive, if you have the sound card AND an external harddrive running through the firewire bus, that can cause issues in it's own (I am a network engineer and that holds true to anything, not just audio). Depending on the hardware involved you will get latency problems pushing too much data through the bus. If you do decide to go external, I agree with the need to have a redundant array (RAID 1) for the data security.
 
Bob,

A couple of things. I generally agree with what you're saying, but it is also important to note that there are many many sound folk that are using a Mac, external hard drive and firewire audio interface with Boom Recorder and Metacorder with no problems. As a matter of fact, there are many that are even recording to both the internal drive and an external drive simultaneously with Boom Recorder and having great success (me included). A RAID array is nice, but I don't see it as a necessity, especially if, as most mixers do, you're running a backup recorder anyway.

Phil
 
A couple of things Bob. The MOTU BOXES that are being talked about are not "firewire cards" they are FW audio interfaces. Second the external FW drive and FW interface are the recommended (by the developer) configuration. Fragmentation is pretty much a non issue with Mac OS X. It used to be a big deal but nobody really worries about it much in audio post any more. It may still be an issue on the PC side??, it's been awhile since I was there. The system drive is bad for a number of reasons. First it is not a particularly fast drive. Second the system uses it periodically so you can get a conflict of interest with your recording. And the last thing you want to beat to hell with a lot of recording is the drive that runs your computer.
I haven't heard of production recordists using mirrored raids (I'm in no way the definitive answer here). That may be because they haven't been that available for the portable market. Usually folks do sort of the same thing by running a mirrored copy. Deva will mirror to DVD Ram. Boom Recorder can write to more than one drive. So you just point to two different drives and you have your mirrored backup. A raid though might have some benefits over two separate drives. audio, unless your at some ridiculously high sample rate , is very light data load. DV video is at 3.5 megs a second, stereo 44.1/16 is at 10 megs a minute. You have to get a HUGE number of tracks before you will start stressing the FW 400 bandwidth. If your worried about it you can get an express eSATA card for the MacBook and go to an external eSATA drive. Then you won't have any conflict with the FW buss.
 
Bob,

Sounded like all the above was directed at you, sorry, just the FW part. While there is no performance benefit to partitioning and there really isn't much of an issue anymore with fragmentation, there is some benifit in post anyway to having partitions and that is pretty much what you said, project separation and the ability to reformat a partition. Reformatting does seem to clean the slate better than just erasing everything and I do have my work drives partitioned for that reason, it is also poss easier to back up, since you can just clone the drive, giving you an instant replacement if the partition goes south.
 
The whole fragmentation issue is to a large extent a non-issue with modern drives and filesystems. Unless you are recording 24 tracks simultaneously, the performance is also most likely a non-issue as well.

If you would like some more information that is not based on random speculation, check out this Apple Tech Note regarding fragmentation and HFS.


To directly answer your question: No
 
Sorry if that came out wrong, I'm just so used to doing things way over the top when it comes to data security. I wouldn't think that there would be an issue with an external harddrive, but just a small hiccup in the bus data stream would case an un-useable audio track. I have a good friend that is a location sound mixer (hence why I got into sound for indie films) and he won't use a computer to record. Anyways, I use a laptop for recording as well but have 2 physical internal drives. You really shouldn't have any issues using an external, the RAID 1 array is 2 drives mirrored together. Let's say you have 2 200gb drives, the RAID array gives you 1 200gb drive with the data on both drives so if one fails, you have an exact copy. It also doubles your read/write speed. It is probably a bit much for this, but depends on how critical your data is.

Not being argumentative, I understand the difference between a FW card and interface. In fact, the interface is recognized by the computer as a sound card since it has it's own on-board processors and memory.

What you guys said is absolutely right and I agree fully. I come into this with a different mindset and apologize for any confusion. :)

Oh and I've had great results on other applications using different bus controllers (i.e. Firewire audio interface, USB 2.0 hard drive). The FW controller has a 400mb max speed to split among total devices plugged in.
 
Two good places to as/ check things out are jwsound and the Boom recorder site. Both have a good amount of info and people you can ask who are doing this all the time.
 
That's a very cool product. I've never seen a Cardbus SATA controller before, although I rarely work with laptop stuff. I really like that idea since it frees up the USB and FW bus for other external equipment. The fact that it can support RAID makes it that much better for critical data.
 
that one is expresscard 34 , but they also have a pc card version if you have that!

It totally rocks and is fast as hell (about 45MB/ second [360Mb/s] in raid 1 mode w/ those WD drives and twice as fast as that in raid 0 [and I mean REAL speeds, not just maximum throughput of the bus] for comparison my usb2.0 stuff moves less than 20MB/s firewire more like 30)
Plus it remvable drive trays (you can buy more) and it uses SATA drives!!!!!!!
 
thanks for all the advice everyone. i'm now thinking that i will look into some sort of external drive, either firewire or eSATA, and i'll take a look at raid arrays.
 
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