Hard drive partitions

[pthomas745]

Been running Sage for a year.

The hard drive in my system died last week. On that one, I had two partitions, one of 200 and another ( for Sage Recordings ) of 300.

After finally getting XP installed on a SATA hard drive, I wound up with a single 500GB partition. And, apparently, I cannot ( for whatever reason) add another partition. Windows XP won't let me do it through Disk Management. The couple of freeware partition managers I tried won't even boot.

I guess I can format and start over, but I'm searching for expertise.

Do I absolutely need a separate partition?

[GKusnick]

You really ought to format your recording partition in 64K clusters, for best recording and playback performance. But your OS partition will waste less space and perform better with a smaller cluster size, such as 4K (the default). So that pretty much dictates separate partitions.

But you might want to go a step further and use separate physical disks. That way OS disk activity won't interfere with the seek pattern on your recording disk, plus you can upgrade your recording disk without having to reinstall your OS.