sata partition details required

[rizvii]

i have 160 gb sata HDD. i wanted to know i what is the right size of partition to install windows xp. is there any limit and if not what is the best size to install xp. I have another sata of 80 GB as well. I am using pinnacle ultimate for DVD burning.


Thanks

[budz]

Use the 80gb sata hard drive for xp. Then use the 160gb sata hard drive as storage.

[creakndale]

IMO, I would make a 20GB partition for Windows XP. This gives plenty of room for the OS, pagefile and lots of programs. You could make it larger but I wouldn't go any smaller than 20GB.

creakndale

[redwudz]

Just use a single partition. With that small a drive, doesn't really matter, IMO. I would also recommend just using the 80GB for boot and save the 160GB for data use. Partitioning is similar to using a folder. The same controller and the same ATA channel is still used. It won't help with efficiency or speed of access or transfer much at all, if any. The only improvement would be speed of defragging or backing up the boot partition, otherwise, just a waste of time using multiple partitions, again, IMO. If you had a 500GB - 1500GB boot drive, then maybe.

[rizvii]

thanks . and what about rendering which drive should i use for rendering. i use pinnacle ultimate 12. My main use of PC is DVD recording.

[budz]

use the 160gb for storage so put your dvd recording stuff on there.

[DarrellS]

I like to use at least three drives.

1. C:\ System Drive
2. D:\ Capture Drive
3. E:\ Storage Drive

My boot drive is 160GB (couldn't find an 80GB drive), capture drive is 500GB, storage drive 1 is 750GB and storage drive 2 and 3 are 1TB each.

Picked up a 1TB Seagate at Fry's on Sunday for $98.

[redwudz]

rizvii may not have other drives available, but I also prefer three drives, boot, edit and storage. But you could use the 160GB drive for encoding, even to and from the same drive. Encoding is not hard drive intensive, just CPU intensive, and most any drive can keep up, even for input/output at the same time. That setup may slow some editing operations, but still much better than just having a single drive in the computer.

The problem with using the boot drive is that the OS accesses it so much that it can slow some operations. Because of that, I don't use mine except for the OS, program storage and some archival data storage. It's also best to keep any hard drive less than 80% full, 70% is even better. That way there is room to defrag when you need to and the drive should be able to operate at optimum speed most of the time.

I'm using a 60GB SSD (Solid State Drive) for boot on one of my computers and have it about 40% full. And that's not easy with Vista. I had to move the paging file and other temp files to other drives. And I try to keep programs from wanting to use it. A SSD drive needs more headroom than a mechanical drive and 50% freespace is about as low as you want to go. It doesn't use defragging, but it does alternate the internal RAM locations. (And it's very fast. )

[rizvii]

i have noticed that if i use a separate drive for rendering the process is really fast instead of using one drive for rendering and os is it true

[INFRATOM]

my suggestion is to buy two similar HD, if you want cheaper buy 2 320GB's a bit more 2 x 500GB then put them as Raid 0 the size becomes double and much faster and use your others for archive. most likely your older HD's are slower too. I think for any video related work RAID is better. Even better if you have 2 Raid one for OS and one for data, it doesn't break any bank but you'll will feel the difference.
Oops I thought you are in US, well I don't know how much HD's are over there. So take my suggestion as technical not $ wise.

[budz]

i have noticed that if i use a separate drive for rendering the process is really fast instead of using one drive for rendering and os is it true

Yes, that's true which is why it has been suggested to you to use the 80GB for the operating system and the 160GB for storage.

[rizvii]

but i have noticed that when i install xp on 160 GB HDD it is a bit slow as compared to the xp installation on 80 GB HDD wht is that so. Is 80 Gb HDD faster than 160 GB

[Nelson37]

Some drives are faster than others. It would appear that your 80 is indeed faster than your 160. Newer drives are typically faster than older ones, and also typically larger. There is no general rule that smaller is faster, in fact usually the other way around.

A single partition is less likely to suffer a catastrophic failure of the partition table than a drive with multiple partitions. A failure of the partition table can make the entire drive unreadable, and unrecoverable by normal means. Very little benefit for very large risk.