Partitions on Mac?

[mfuchs19]

Hey All! So I have a brand new 15" MBP coming in the mail. 500GB HDD, 4GB RAM, quad core @ 2.2 Ghz. I was wondering what you guys thought about setting up a separate partition for DJing related stuff. Has anyone here done this? If so, for what reason and what were the results? Anybody have any objections of why this is a bad idea? I've never tried so just wanna make sure I'm not wasting my time and effort because it might now even make a difference. Thanks guys!

[padi_04]

You mean dual booting or just a partition? You won't get any performance benefits by doing either but i'm curious .

[DJWORX]

Never saw any benefits in partitioning myself. It can be handy for optimised organisation, but generally working on a folder level should be fine for DJing. I find partitioning to be limiting as partitions get full, and resizing is a nightmare.

And if ever I needed to boot from another partition, I'd just stick it on an external. My advice as a time served former Mac tech support bod - stick to one partition.

[mfuchs19]

Alright well it sounds like ill just be working from one partition instead of keeping DJ and other stuff separate. Thanks guys!

[mfuchs19]

You mean dual booting or just a partition? You won't get any performance benefits by doing either but i'm curious .

Oh I meant just a separate partition to boot onto, not a different OS. Am I understanding your question?

[Jiggle]

I did this on my mba, I got a mbp this year, i7 2.3 8gb, its awesome. Anyways, I have partitioned the hdd on it, because it arrived the day lion was released & at the time snow leopard meant less problems. I rarely use lion at the moment. I think its a good idea to have a separate dj partition, if you dj anywhere other than home you'd need something reliable. Ive had 4 working boot partitions on my old mba, But I think 3 is the realistic limit. Im sure I had to use grub on of the partitions for linux.

Sorry I went on a bit, if you do want to dual boot it, just create a new partition in the free space at the end of the drive, format it. All can be done with disk utility. Reboot and install whichever os you like on your new partition.

Press alt while switching it on to choose which os to boot.

[padi_04]

Oh I meant just a separate partition to boot onto, not a different OS. Am I understanding your question?

Then it's dual boot

[mfuchs19]

Oh ok! Thank's guys! This was all very helpful, got two opposing views which is always good, and learned some stuff along the way. I think I'm just going to start with the default of 1, being as I do play out, but not very often at all. I think that when I soon upgrade to 8GB ram, it should be speedy enough to keep up too (which i'll probably do for christmas). Thanks again!


Edit: But what about this? Sometimes stuff can go wrong and if I've only got one copy of important stuff like Traktor, there is a chance i could delete something I really need or mess it up in some way, and have no way to fix it if I'm playing out. In this case, would it be a good idea to partition an external drive I have an install Mac OS and traktor onto there so that if ever needed, I could just plug in, boot into it, and go? Would USB 2.0 be able to handle data-intensive tasks like that?

[Jiggle]

With 8 gb of ram I think it would, you can boot timemachine backups I think, that would be the easiest way. Or use ccc. Or just install a fresh copy onto the external drive

[mostapha]

USB 2 is fine. Firewire is better. Thunderbolt is even better, but you'll only see advantage with an SSD in a chassis…which is worth it anyway because it won't die if you drop it.

You can't boot off time-machine backups except to restore, which takes a long time (restoring my 64GB SSD off a FW 7200RPM drive took like 40 minutes…not viable during a gig).

But, yeah…having an identical backup drive is a plus. It's second best to having an identical computer as a backup.

As far as dual-booting. Umm…I do that all the time, but not for DJing. Occasionally, I need to run linux for specific coding projects…and I use Disk Utility to resize and ReFit to handle boot loading. Never had a problem. Never even really had a headache after I gave up on Ubuntu ad went back to Gentoo (Ubuntu is terrible). OS X handles this kind of abuse better than any other system I've used. I seriously had the same OS X install from about a week after Snow Leopard came out until I got my new MBP this spring. I went through 20 linux installs in that time for various projects, though most of them were just cloning an external onto my newly expanded unpartitioned space and setting up ReFit again.

If you want to do that, you totally can.

If it weren't so easy to disable all of the iOS-like "next gen" crap that Apple keeps adding to OS X, I'd be dual-booting OS X for music and Linux for everything else…and I know it wouldn't be a problem.

But, I don't think it's absolutely necessary. Hell, I don't even turn off wifi and bluetooth when I DJ. Most of the time, I don't bother quitting Chrome, Adium, Terminal, TextEdit, Stickies, or anything else that isn't specifically a resource hog either unless it's at a gig.

Still…no problems.