External HD vs. Music Partition

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
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1

External HD vs. Music Partition

Hi guys,

i’ve been wondering how you guys think about it,

does it make much difference for your pc performance if you keep all your music on a seperate partition or on a external hard disk?

I kept it some time on a harddisk (portable so usb powered) but i constantly had issues with it, now i have it on a partition and all problems are solved.

But would it cause latency?

Gorik/Digitrack

2

It’s pretty common to have a data partition, and an OS partition. Don’t know what effect it will have on performance, though.

3

Mine is all on the same partition. Don’t think it really makes any difference if the data is on the same physical disk.

4

It is usually a good idea to separate data and the OS/programs onto different physical and/or logical volumes.

  1. installing new/fresh OS’s is easier.
  2. reduces the risk of total failure. Caveat: using two physical drives is better than two logical drives
  3. Anecdotal evidence points to faster performance due to an additional drive for virtual memory and paging.

I personally believe it is good practice to separate the two. My $0.02

5

Thanks for the replies!

I’ll keep it in mind, probably I’ll keep everything on my partition as long as everything goes as it should. From the moment that I notice latency problems, it’s time to buy a new external HD I guess.

6

An additional question,

does anybody has experience with Usb sticks or SD cards to store your music?
Is it as fast as a harddisk?

7

USB 2.0 can transfer data at speeds up to 120 MB/s
I believe SD cards can transfer at speeds at around 90 MB/s
Hard Disks (SATA II) can reach speeds up to 300 MB/s