[Ridley Walker] "I agree with Dave. There's no real benefit in partitioning the internal HD. Get an external SSD for the media cache and set it up via preferences > media and disk cache."
I'm with Dave and Ridley here.
Partitioning gives you a management benefit (that logical separation between OS/apps and data), but often incurs a performance penalty (because the same drive has to service all kinds of I/O requests).
[Ridley Walker] "Ideally you have media on one drive, renders to another and cache on a 3rd."
I don't think splitting the media onto one drive and renders onto another is always necessary. The only time this will give you a concrete improvement is when your renders are disk-bound (when reading/writing takes longer than computation). I'd recommend going for a fast RAID if budget allows before I'd recommend separate drives.
That said, keeping the cache on a dedicated SSD drive is a good idea. This can be connected via Thunderbolt.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at
Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog - What I'm thinking when my workstation's thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events