Note that the small 2GB partition needs space for swap files, which usually take up even more space. And if you partition a drive, remember that if a drive fails, everything on it is gone, no matter what partition it is on. Unless you spend $$$ on professional recovery.

You would also need to do this whole thing with symlinks and other UNIX stuff. That could cause other problems. Sometimes all that trouble isn't worth the speed increase you get.

So how big should the partition be for the OS's info? I just said 2GB as a guess. Would 3GB suffice?

Well it depends on what you install into the system and how big the swap files are going to get, which depends on what you do, etc. and if you start doing more ambitious projects later, your partition could turn out to be too small.

That's why I stopped partitioning the startup drive. I always guess too low and have to enlarge it later. Eventually I just said screw it, let it have all the room it needs. Now it's happy.

NO!!

Panther is happy with 10Gb, unless you install monster apps on the boot partition (there is usually no reason to put them there other than convenience)

For Tiger, I would increase it to 15Gb. The downside to partitioning is that it's very, very inconvenient to change it later.

Remember that the boot volume size needs to contain not only the OS but all the temp/swap files that come and go.

All the systems at my office run 10.3 with a 10Gb boot partition. I do custom installs minus extra languages/fonts/printers, and some programs like Office and the Adobe packages are on the other partition. Home folders are networked, and I linked the internet cache folders to /dev/null (effectively disables them).

to be honest i wouldn partition my internal disc.
you could get into more troubles than before.
and who could know how many space some heavy apps
use on a partitioned system like Photoshop CS3, Logic pro, Digital Performer,
Final Cut Pro, and so on, as for heavy users and professionals.

once second back to fragmentation please:
is there any app which shows me the fragmentation
of my discs properly? i tried idefrag, and posted this screen earlier here,
but it showed 0% fragmentation. so i thought it shows wrong data.
as i guess it should be fragmented as i used the disc as scratch disc
for big files like 100GB or 200GB RAW images.
the photoshop layer file was in the end at 1000 MB,
and it swapped big tiles to disc, so in the end my 250GB disc
was full, getting error "disc full", even it had 120GB free space

here it is again:

http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p...n/10f893f2.png



by the way someone recommended plusoptimizer by alsoft:

it wont work with 10.4 apparently:

"PlusOptimizer and Mac OS X (including 10.4.x)
PlusOptimizer will not optimize disks that have
been written to by Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later.
PlusOptimizer will optimize Mac OS X 10.0 through
10.3.9 Extended disks while running under Mac OS 9.x."

I don't have an answer for you, I just wanted to say: "DAMN, that's a massive picture." Good luck finding a solution.