A Separate Hard Drive For DVD Capture etc..??

[pbmc59]

Hi,
I presently have a 120G hard drive, and hear sometmes that it would be better to have separate hard drive to do all my DVD work on.
Is this true? If so why?
Also, what's a good size for that purpose?
One more thing: if I do get a separate drive, should all the software for DVD work be installed on it?
Thanks for your time.

[BubbaLeroy]

Yes, a separate drive would be preferred. When you add and remove programs, add and delete files, your drive will get fragmented. This will slow down disk access and writing. So your operating system and program files on one drive. In the best world, Another drive for static files, i.e. finished files which will not be edited, just stored. Another drive for work in progress, that one you can reformat when ever it is empty. Another drive say 40GB for temp files, not necessary but speeds things up. Hope this helps.

[TeeeRex]

Just to add some other comments to the above in recommendation for more than one HD.

In terms of speed - the more 'spindles' the faster the disc input/output.
The thing that slows down HD's is the 'seek' time - lets take for example a demultiplex operation - on a single drive, the disk would have to read the file, move (or seek) to another part of thr disk to write the demultiplexed output, move back to the original file, read the next bit and so on. If you did this across spindles - ie your source file was on the C: (disk0) but your output was on the Ddisk1) - then both disks would NOT have to seek and it would be constant IO. You can easily get a 100-200% improvement in speed this way on disk intensive applications.

On the same note and identical concept - you can even have multiple disks setup to act as 'one' disk (called RAID0) This way you get almost double the throughput of a nornmal read/write.

PS - It's only disk intensive operations that benefit from multiple spindles - encoding is limited by your processor not the IO - you'll see a small performance benefit from having your source on one drive and output on another but not much.

PPS - Don't confuse drive letters with spindles - a drive may have multiple partitions (drive letters) but be on the SAME spindle ...

Just my two peneth...

[housepig]

now here's a related question -

I have a machine configured with 2 ide controllers, and I have an 80Gb hard drive on one controller (configured as 2 40Gb drives), and my DVD burner on the other controller.

I have another 80Gb drive that I want to install, so I can convert files from one of the 40Gb partitions to the 80Gb drive, for the speed boost of having simultaneous in/out.

The question is, do I put the second hard drive on the same controller as the first, or do I put it on the controller with the DVD burner? (and why?)

any info appreciated.

- housepig

[TeeeRex]

housepig..

the maximum speed on any one 'bus' (IDE channel) is always dictated by the 'slowest' device (the DVD burner).

Therefore I would not recommend putting the 2nd HD on the DVD channel - put it as a slave on the primary IDE channel and you will get the performance you're after.

Better still is to add another IDE controller but that's the extreme ....

[txpharoah]

Actually the extreme is a RAID card. RAID 0 is most common. It's nice.