KVR Audio

zeep · Post by **zeep** » Tue May 22, 2012 7:58 am

So Happy with my new ordered DAW. It's coming in this week. I got a lot of info from KVR, cheers for that.

I find info on the web saying it is important to have equal partitions on a SSD, (each partition must be dividable by 4096 and come up without decimals), because otherwise performance goes down, but most of these articles work with ubuntu and i work with win7.
So what's the best way to do it?

BertKoor · Post by **BertKoor** » Tue May 22, 2012 8:05 am

On Windows systems you'd use the FDISK command for partitioning.

But if your SSD drive is not larger than say 200GB I'd not bother with partitioning. The only big gain is that making backups of essential data is somewhat easier if it all sits on a seperate drive letter. Even without, it should be easy to backup just c:\documents or whatever folder.

zeep · Post by **zeep** » Tue May 22, 2012 8:58 am

The thing is, i read somewhere NOT to use FDISK with a SSD. It won't be optimised and performance will be degraded.

I'm still reading articles about it..

whyterabbyt · Post by **whyterabbyt** » Tue May 22, 2012 9:37 am

If you're using an SSD with 3 or 4 times the throughput of a 7200rpm drive, will you really notice if its not behaving optimally? What's the potential affect?

As I pointed out in another thread

sustained data transfer needed to stream 100 simultaneous 96Khz 24-bit stereo tracks : 58MB/s

Comparing that to an SSD drive with, say, a 300MB/s throughput, at what point would you notice the effect? For example, I have a (relatively old, slow, SATA-3Gb) 30Gb SSD buffering (via Intel SmartResponse) the (traditional spinny rusty metal disc) drive with my Kontakt samples on it. Loading a just-installed 300Mb sample set took noticable seconds to load the first time, but was pretty much instantaneous on subsequent reloads, courtesy of the SSD. Even if there was a 50% degradation in speed because of bad formatting, it would still be instantaneous compared to loading it from a hard drive.

So realistically, is it even worth worrying about? Wait a couple of months and the same money will get you a faster SSD anyway.

zeep · Post by **zeep** » Tue May 22, 2012 9:45 am

Hi whyterabbit, thanks for you reply. I'm not the type to set and forget things such as this. The SSD is costly and i want to maintain performance and understand it.

If you read this article for instance, you'll get the big picture. Though this article is very informative it leaves me with the question, how do i setup the correct partitions from the start.

mandolarian · Post by **mandolarian** » Tue May 22, 2012 9:51 am

Win 7 already knows how to correctly align partitions on SSDs, so you don't have to.

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Tue May 22, 2012 9:52 am

I would never partition an SSD to more than one partition per drive, purely out of practical reasons.

whyterabbyt · Post by **whyterabbyt** » Tue May 22, 2012 9:56 am

zeep wrote:Hi whyterabbit, thanks for you reply. I'm not the type to set and forget things such as this. The SSD is costly and i want to maintain performance and understand it.

If you read this article for instance, you'll get the big picture. Though this article is very informative it leaves me with the question, how do i setup the correct partitions from the start.

Is your SSD intended to be your boot drive?

whyterabbyt · Post by **whyterabbyt** » Tue May 22, 2012 9:56 am

EvilDragon wrote:I would never partition an SSD to more than one partition per drive, purely out of practical reasons.

What practical reasons?

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Tue May 22, 2012 10:00 am

I just don't see a point in doing so. On a regular hard drive, each new partition you make is going to be slower than preceding one. On SSD, there is no such difference, since the transfer rate is pretty much constant throughout the drive. So the only reason you'd want to partition an SSD is to have some kind of logical organization, which I find kinda futile. I'd rather have 1 SSD per partition in that case.

zeep · Post by **zeep** » Tue May 22, 2012 10:16 am

Ok my reason to partition is this.
My mobo has 4x SATA600, and i want all my drives connected. (asus P8Z77-V PRO)

1x SSD 128GB as boot drive C, win7.
1x SSD 256GB in two partitions. D Audio apps + library, E projects and recordings.
1x SSD 128GB win7 swap file and video/graphics apps.
1x HD 1TB.

This is how i always installed my system/daw, works nice and clean.

whyterabbyt · Post by **whyterabbyt** » Tue May 22, 2012 10:24 am

zeep wrote:Ok my reason to partition is this.
My mobo has 4x SATA600, and i want all my drives connected. (asus P8Z77-V PRO)

1x SSD 128GB as boot drive C, win7.
1x SSD 256GB in two partitions. D Audio apps + library, E projects and recordings.
1x SSD 128GB win7 swap file and video/graphics apps.
1x HD 1TB.

This is how i always installed my system/daw, works nice and clean.

According to the article you referenced, there is no issue if you format via the windows installer....

This means that sometimes, if your SSD was formatted by something other than Windows' installer, it can be aligned incorrectly

whyterabbyt · Post by **whyterabbyt** » Tue May 22, 2012 10:38 am

EvilDragon wrote:I just don't see a point in doing so. On a regular hard drive, each new partition you make is going to be slower than preceding one. On SSD, there is no such difference, since the transfer rate is pretty much constant throughout the drive. So the only reason you'd want to partition an SSD is to have some kind of logical organization, which I find kinda futile. I'd rather have 1 SSD per partition in that case.

Preferring not to do something isnt a 'practical reason' against it though. There are lots of things I'd 'rather have' but I find that organising what I do have pragmatically works perfectly well, when informed by my needs.

What I need is a logical organisation of my data and applications, and as much redundancy against failure as possible, within the constraints of cost (personally I find the notion of paying for another SSD just to avoid creating a partition to be 'kinda silly') and equipment (6Gb SATA ports on a motherboard are finite).

jcschild · Post by **jcschild** » Tue May 22, 2012 2:19 pm

thre is absolutely no reason to partition an SSD i fail to see any point to this.

partitioning any drive today is pointless

zeep · Post by **zeep** » Tue May 22, 2012 2:34 pm

Thanks for your opinion.

It's really helpful.

How do i partition a SSD drive?? (win7)