Smijter,

> will it affect the performance if i partition the drives? ... where do i put my software?

Partitions are good. :)

My recent three-part series in Keyboard magazine addressed these issues and many more in great detail. Part 3 is now on the newsstands, and Parts 1 and 2 are on my web site:

http://www.ethanwiner.com/articles.html

--Ethan

Actually I will have to disagree with you Ethan. Partitions are not good, not bad, but not performance friendly. Partitions actually can slow you down in the sense that the reader has to search even harder(or work harder) when going between partition "walls" I did a bench mark with partitioned drives and found that they actually slow you down some. Also since the reader works harder you are actually taking the chance of making the drive fail easier. The less strain on the reader the better IMHO
I put all samples on the OS and APP drive and disable Write Caching. Samples and files of that nature(especially Reason files) are read only and rarely written to. Disabling the Write caching actually boosts your read time on the OS drive exponentially.
That's my $.02 worth
Opus

Opus,

> the reader has to search even harder(or work harder) when going between partition "walls"

I'm surprised to hear that, because if anything I'd expect the opposite. When a DAW is playing many tracks [separate files] at once, and the entire drive is one partition, the drive heads might have to seek from one end of the platter to the other constantly. For example, if the drum overheads are near the center of the platter and the electric bass is near the outside edge. When constrained to a smaller partition the maximum potential head movement is less. At least that's how I understand modern disk organization.

Of course, the original question included where samples should go. Whether partitions are faster or slower or neither may depend on what sampler program you're using. If it's a streaming sampler like Giga or Halion, then it's like the multi-track example. If they're all loaded into memory first, it's probably moot.

But to me, one big advantage of partitions is being able to use Norton Ghost to back up the entire state of Windows and all my installed programs. When everything is all on one huge partition, you need another equally large partition to back up to with that method, and it takes much longer. Likewise, defragmenting a given amount of data takes many times longer when it's all in one partition versus defragmenting several smaller partitions in succession.

At least that's what I've always thought. :D If any of this is in error, please straighten me out.

--Ethan

well guys, i'll tell you what i did. I 've read all the sites i could find and i decided to partition my two drives.
I did go a bit mental actually...now i have 13 partitions...hope it doesn't bring me bad luck :) .
i did this because i use the same computer for school work ( i study informatics ) and to play a game once in a while ( actually i only play GTA2 over the internet cause its so amusing to kick your friends butts)

i have a partition for win XP ( which i tweaked, thank you Opus), one for my musicsoftware,one for samples, a small one ( 5GB ) for my current songs(and recordings), one for backup etc... i even have one for temporary internet files cause the defragmenting argument seemed to make a lot of sense to me.

So that's it in a nutshell...

i'd like to thank you all for the advice and excuse me for my bad english but hey...i live in cold and wet belgium ( till i get famous that is :D )

See Ya