Video capturing to 2nd dual partitioned hard disk?

[Hong Kong Phooey]

Hi all,
I was considering buying a 2nd harddisk, probably an 80Gb. I was looking at partitioning it 30Gb/50Gb. The 30Gb is going to be my system drive for Xp home which I'm planning to multiboot with my current 20Gb (Win98), primary drive.

My plan is have all partitions FAT32 so I can readily access AVI files in either O/S. (Personal preference, I'm happy with my '98 capturing setup)
My main concern though is will the AVI capturing performance to the 2nd hardisk be affected? (ie:the empty 50Gb partition of the 80Gb drive) My motherboard is ATA100 (As is the primary system drive)

I've presently already have a 40Gb slave ATA 100 HDD which captures well with only tiny frame loss,(usually due to bad video, say 10 frames in 25mins capture.). Would the capturing performance be worse on a dual partitioned drive as described above,compared to the single partitioned, empty drive?

[Gritz]

If it was me I'd upgrade my Win98 with Win XP Home on the 20 GB Boot Drive you now have and convert to NTFS. NTFS is faster and more secure, and I don't think you'll have many problems with any of your current programs (unless you have some exotic software). Better yet would be to use the 40GB you now have as a slave for your boot drive. If you stay with Fat 32 you'll likely have a problem with the ability to delete an avi larger than 4 GB (a registry fix is available I'm sure though). XP runs much better than Win98. Use you newest drive as a slave with one partition for all your video stuff. Make some directorys like "Capture", "Encode", "Video Clips", "Title Sets", "Temp", etc. Doing a VHS quality capture of a 2 hour movie can take up to 60GB so you'll likely need all the space for video stuff anyway. Your fastest hard drive will be the same speed as the slower drive. According to what I've read in Maximum PC WinXP does best in a single partition.

[Hong Kong Phooey]

Thanks for the reply Gritz. Yeah, I'm well aware of the NTFS pluses, but I'm happy enough with my current capture setup on Win 98. The eventual (planned),dual booting O/S situation is going to be testing the waters with XP, hence my original post.

I've got a (pinnacle),PCTV pro card,& read of a no. of complaints related to their newer WDM XP related drivers,(Video/audio going out of sync etc.) ,so I'd rather get a feel for XP first & see what its like in action.

By keeping to FAT32, I'll have the option to go either way depending on how it'd go.
(All my hardware "should" work, although Creative's patches for the SB Live! card looks like it'll be a fun install)

All the concerned drives would be ATA 100,(both fed off the primary ATA slot). I know I could always go for a dedicated ATA controller card, but If I could operate on only the two drives & still maintain the present capture speeds I'd be satisfied.

I just wasn't sure if dual partitiions on the same (2nd) harddisk would've affected the capture rate or not,(with one being the XP system,& the other the "empty".)