Here is what I’ve learned in my 10 years of messing with computers and digital media.

You have to be very careful about what you put on your hard drive. Only put something on a hard drive you plan to leave on that hard drive and utilize.

How is this possible you wonder. Well, you have to have a “Media Drive” and use it for all your important media. Music, video etc… Then you have to have a bullshit hard drive and use it for all your dynamic content. Unfortunetly computers aren’t designed this way, so what you have to do is probably use your computers internal drive as your bullshit drive letting it store all kinds of web images, .swf files from youtube, and all kinds of other crap that is stored in all kinds of random spots on your drive.

Then with your media drive, you need to make a clone of it and spend twice the money. Yes, two drives, both with the same capacity and both with the same name. I still don’t have an automated way to keep these two drives in sync but I think the new OS time travel application will do it. Haven’t tried yet.

Then I think you need yet another back up drive. One to back up your entire main OS X drive. So that all of your files stay in tact.

So you with me, this is 4 drives. Your internal bullshit drive, your back up bullshit drive, your media drive of important work and the clone back up to that drive.

Then you have maintaining . The only true maintaining of a drive I know of is to zero all data. This is possible with the disk utility when you got to “erase” a drive and check off “zero all data” in the options.

Doing this will dramatically improve performance of your operating system bullshit drive and of your media drive.

And because you have a clone of each of these drives, doing it is not a problem.

Now, how often do you do this. Well in theory you only have to do it on the media drive when you’ve deleted a good chunk of whats on the media drive and want to put new material on there. However, keeping the future in mind, it’s kind of dumb to delete stuff. So, I suggest simply getting a new media drive in that event and if your pocket book allows, put the old media drive and it’s clone in safe keeping (ideally in two geographic locations) and then get started with a new cloned pair of drives.

On the other hand your internal bullshit drive. There is nothing you can do to prevent the constant downloading and erasing of files and since this is what causes information to be split up all over the Hard drive plater in confusing places for your machine to understand, you’ll want to do this often. Ideally every month, or maybe ever 6 months or at least once a year.

So I’ve had my mac book almost one year and I now need to do that. The thing is so slow and thats why. This is especially important these days because of virtual memory. There is now way you’ll ever afford enough ram for even running something as simple as firefox and having a few web 2.0 pages open and still having your work environment open in the background. So your computer uses your hard drive instead of ram. This sucks big time because as I’ve been discussing, all of our hard drives are totally messed up do to constant loading and then deleting of files.

So I’m excited about the new computers apple has coming out using solid state hard drives. I need to research more but I’m pretty sure that loosing the physical aspect of storing drives and disc platters will eliminate all of what I’m complaining about. What makes me theorize this is the fact that you never have to replace your RAM. Because the area of the RAM that information is stored on doesn’t affect it’s performance. Consider this verses the fact that having a file partially on the inside of a hard drive disc and partially on the outer rim of the hard drive disc can slow down access tremendously. Well, this is what we are dealing with every time a computer locks for a moment.

If I have any of this wrong, I’d be glad to be enlightened, but this is what I’ve found to ring true in my experiences and what I’ve read about in piece meal here and there.