Partitioning external hard drive

[Guest]

I have an 80GB Iomega external hard drive that I want to add a 5GB partition
to (to use as a scratch disk for photoshop program). It has 30GB free space,
but when I go to Computer Management/Disk Management and right click, there
is no option to add a partition. Will de-fragmenting the external HDD help,
or will I need to completely reformat it? I'm hoping not to re-format since
I have so much back-up info there and would have to copy all that info
elsewhere while I reformat.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Michele

 

[R. McCarty]

Partitions (volumes) can only be created from Unallocated space.
You would need a 3rd-Party disk management tool to shrink the
existing partitions to leave unallocated space and then create the
new partition. However, for use as a scratch source using one that's
at the end of a drive might not be an efficient choice. This would
require more head movement to read/write sectors and might in
the end actually slow down Photoshop functions. Plus if that
Iomega is a USB drive you wouldn't want to use it for scratch as
the throughput is only around ~25 Megabytes, much lower than
even a standard PATA/IDE drive.

 

[MoiMeme]

Use BootItNG to repartition without loosing data. Program is shareware but
trial program will allow to do all you need.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your help - what would be the best way to set up a scratch disk?
Should I just buy another hard drive or is there an easier (cheaper) way to
do it?

 

[R. McCarty]

Maybe a small SATA drive and a inexpensive SATA PCI card. You
can probably get a setup from Tiger Direct for around ~$70 total. I
use an External SATA kit from AcomData. Excellent performance &
the enclosure uses a Western Digital SATA drive. CompUSA sells
them - the biggest issue is finding one in stock. That's really the only
downside to USB externals, the speed. My next desktop PC will be
based on SATA-II externals as the only mass storage - no drives in
the physical case at all. Hard to give you a definite answer - sometimes
more physical RAM is a better purchase to improve performance.

 

[Guest]

Hi and thanks. I downloaded BootItNG but have not been able to figure out how
to use it. It might be beyond my simple Windows skills. I've got the op
manual but after half-hour of work, I still couldn't figure out how to use
it, so I'm saving it for when I have more time. The BootitNG.exe file throws
me into DOS and I can't figure out what to do next. The makedisk.exe asks me
to save a file, but when I do and then try to open it, all I get is a request
to install Sonic Record. I'm completely out of my depth (which is extremely
shallow indeed).