I've heard it's good to make a seperate hard drive or use a divider or something for all your music apps. because it frees up memory and makes your computer go faster. wheeee! How do you do this? I'm pretty new to mac's and maybe a little ignorant about computers in general. Thanks in advance.

well you could just buy a seperate hard drive probably 10+gb and also a fairly fast hard drive(not shure exactly but i would say 7200rpms+) and a fast seek time (-9ms). if you have the cash the ipod is fairly interesting and you could take your files and port them to other computers if you wanted without any hassle. well good luck

Having a separate drive for your audio files from your applications is a good idea. It won't really make your computer go faster however it will increase your track count slightly and will make your system/application drive less fragmented.

For the separate drive you will obviously need to buy one.
What sort of mac do you have?
You can buy a firewire or IDE or SCSI.
If you have newer mac the first 2 are preferable.
If you have an iBook or tibook the firewire option is the one for you.

If you only have one drive and want to partition it you will need to re-format your drive. i.e. if you do this you will lose all data that you have on your drive so you should back everything up first.
Once formatted and partitioned you will need to reinstall the System Software and all your programs.
If you can be bothered to do this here are the details.
1. Back-up everything.
2 Start up computer from System Disk (hold down the 'C' key while you start up the computer).
3. Run the program "Drive Setup" from your System Disk.
4. Click 'Initialize' then click 'custom setup'
5. You now have the choice to set the number of partitions and their sizes.

p.s. I wouldn't use an iPod as a device to record audio to/from a sequencer.
It's fine to transfer files to and from your computer and play mp3 files etc. but not adviseable for disk intensive applications such as recording/playing back 10-20+ audio files at once.

I have read somewhere that Apple do not recommend doing this.

Matt

Depending on how serious you want to get about this, for the ultimate separate hard disk system you should get something like the Glyph Companion FireWire drive. Optimised for audio work, spindle rate 7,200 rpm. Very quiet, very reliable, very fast. 80Gb. Around £450. Full duplex - ie it can record and play back at the same time, which most hard drives cannot do, hence the hiccups and glitches that occasionally occur. Just buying a LaCie or SmartDisk desktop hard drive is NOT the same.

hey rickenbacker,
i love your input in these forums, find you to be a very valuable member of this community.
but...
i don't understand this recommendation.
i find firewire too slow (well, only a bit), for audio. my firewire drive has the latest firewire to ide bus, surely, the best idea is to have your sequencer on a different drive to your audio, and both of these should be non-firewire drives.
also, 450 quid for an 80gb drive??? that's a hell of a price...
anyhow, peace, later.

Rickenbacker, you should really read a test in SOS this month upon Firewire drives

It happens that the glyph is the best of the test, yes.

But the LaCie is strangely similar… see… (there's something under that…)

I still haven't had time to read all (especially the noise issue, if you can -hear- a drive noise near the new macs but the numbers are clear on the work part of the problem.

If someone had a better controler for firewire, we'll now it already. btw, do you think 450£ is expensive for an enclosure looking like you HD system, or you Mbox… (noise issue asside, can't comment on this)

You can buy 240Gb drives for half that price now… Wake up like Laurent Garnier would say

I'll have to read this SOS FireWire report, as I'd like to know all the options available and see the test results etc. I don't know much about other FireWire drives, but I had a Glyph Companion on loan for a couple of weeks and loved it. I'd like to buy one permanently but they're so bloody expensive and I'm in the middle of buying a house.

As for the size, I think 80GB is enough storage space for me - that's more than enough for all the multitrack files for a couple of albums at least. After that point, I'd be backing them up to CD-R or whatever anyway because all drives can potentially fail, however big or expensive they are.

I know the Companion seems expensive, but believe me the build quality is excellent - it's the Rolls Royce of hard drives! It uses a special composite metal (used by only one other company in the world!) for optimum cooling properties - the fan only came on once when I used it, so it's also incredibly quiet. It's fast, full duplex, 7200 rpm spindle rate, uses the 911 chipset, blah blah blah.

Anyhow, this isn't a Glyph product placement - I just know that it's a really, really good choice for a FireWire drive. And I think a separate FireWire drive has to be the best option for audio at the moment - used just for storing the files. Have your sequencer app on the computer's hard drive and flow your audio back and forth to your external FireWire drive.

Well, that's what I do and it works for me!

I ordered an 80 gig 7200rpm and a 120 gig 7200 rpm FW drive for 200€ and 300€ respectively the other day. I was surprised cause I didn´t expect to get them as cheap, but damn, I´m a happy camper

As for enclosures, those tend to be very noisy. I have a RAID hd box at work, which probably puts out well over 50 db (4 fans). Performance is not an issue though, really

Filarion - out if interest, which company manufactured the drives you bought? I'm going to have to buy a new external FireWire drive soon, so I'm interested in what other Mac musicians are using.