Computer down after upgrade.... ADvice?

[fmctm1sw]

Well, what do I do now? I'm going to do a total reformat of my 80 GB drive. I've heard people mentioning to capture to a drive other than where their operating system is. Does that mean I should make a partition for my OS of say 3GB or 4GB and make a big one for my caps? Or are folks talking about another drive altogether (physically)? What about block size? I've heard that bigger block sizes can equate to faster I/O at a cost of some wasted space though. Give me some opinions because there is no better time to do all this than now....

[i_am_dave]

Different partitions on the same physical drive are not going to improve performance, in fact, it will probably worsen it.
Different partitions are set on different physical areas of the same drive, that means your drive is going to be constanly seeking across a large span.

Go with dual drives, in addition to drastically reducing seek time, you will increase read and write throughput and get an additional 2-8MB of disk cache.

I am running two 120gig drives. My first drive contains OS and programs. My second drive is used exclusively for editing.

[Karate Media]

Dave -- of all my readin' and learnin', that's the first time I've ever heard that.

In fact, most people (learned ones, that is, not just people like me) say that it is a VERY good idea to create a separate partition for your operating system. I can't qoute sources at the moment (I probably read close to 20 PC magazines/websites every month), but I know that I've read it numerous times, b/c I cringe each time w/ the knowledge that I don't have my OS on a separate partition...

I would think that most people would say to keep a separate partition for capturing as well. Since those files will come and go often, it's best to keep that traffic all in one confined area.

I'll try to come up with some citations if I can...

[i_am_dave]

Karate Media,

Yes, it is probably a good idea to keep them seperate, but I believe the reason for that is to reduce file fragmentation, not to improve performance. Before I added my second drive, I would get into trouble when I almost filled up my drive with a capture. Talk about fragmenting, especially the swap file.

I can see the benefit from keeping your OS in one partition, provided you make it large enough.

But... you will get the biggest improvement in performance by adding a totally seperate drive.

fmctm1sw might benifit the most by purchasing a 40Gig drive for his programs and OS and using his 80Gig drive for video editing. (That is if it is fast enough )

[fmctm1sw]

I'm especially interested in performance. BUT, I don't have the jack for a new hard drive. The best I could do for another drive is a 850MB (yes MEG) drive at PIO mode 4.

[i_am_dave]

I'm especially interested in performance. BUT, I don't have the jack for a new hard drive. The best I could do for another drive is a 850MB (yes MEG) drive at PIO mode 4.

Ouch! Maybe if your good the rest of the year, Santa might leave a new one in your stocking this year

Santa was the one that gave me my 120Gig drive

[Karate Media]

Actually, keeping the OS separate is more to save your butt when your OS crashes (and also to help avoid corrupting the OS in the first place by keeping the in and out activity on that partition to a minimum). If your OS is on a separate partition, then you can do a clean reinstall w/out losing any other information on the other partition.

Again, if I have time, I will try to locate my cites on this one...

(as for block size -- I just did a search on that topic not too long ago when I bought my 2nd internal HDD - a 120 GB WD Caviar used as a slave. From what I can tell, a 4KB cluster size will be sufficient for maximizing speed and minimal wasted disk space. If you are capturing GBs worth of raw footage, an extra lost KB or 3 won't really make much of a difference)

[gmatov]

I think if you have 2 drives, you would do well to partition a C:\ for the OS, whatever other partitions you need, then a large partiton to rip TO.
A second drive can be 1 unpartitioned huge space to CONVERT to.
Your program would get data from 1 drive, operate on it, write to the second drive, no heads seeking back and forth, reading here, writing there.
Time improvement, I don't know, but should help a little, but I don't think read/write time makes for 14 hour jobs.

[Northstar]

I have 3 hardrives in my pc and i use the smallest (12.1gb) with a 1.5gig partition for win2k just so i can image the drive with Powerquest Drive Image, its always nice to be able to go back if something bad happens... and it does more often than you think

I do have each drive on its own ide cable cause i have a pci raid card used in normal ide mode (raiding isnt all its cracked up to be).

[i_am_dave]

I do have each drive on its own ide cable cause i have a pci raid card used in normal ide mode (raiding isnt all its cracked up to be).

Really? What problems have you had? I have considered going to raid on my next system.

[rallynavvie]

I ran out of room once on my old PC with 2 80GB HDDs in it and I swore I wouldn't let that happen again with my new box. Well I may have overdone it a bit. Though I have 2 80GB drives on my RAID controller I actually only use them as 2 seperate hard drives now. My boot drive is an unpartitioned (for now) 120GB drive that I use only for the OS, programs, and scratch jobs (works in progress that will eventually be deleted). My 2nd drive is a 200GB which I use for storage of files that I'll keep on my PC forever. I used to use the RAID drives to stripe to but I didn't see a dramatic decrease in dropped frames and encoding performance to and from this array so I went a different route. I've since picked up a good SCSI host adapter and some 15k RPM SCSI drives and am in love with how well these work for capturing and editing. Granted you can only work on 4-5 hours worth of video per 18GB SCSI drive, but when you've got 2 in your PC and 5 waiting for an enclosure you find that's all the space you need. I'd suggest SCSI over regular IDE RAID anyday. SCSI RAID? I don't have the $$$ for a SCSI RAID adapter (a good one at least) just yet but I'm building a new PC and looking for system SCSI RAID support

[Will Hay]

A partition for capture is a waste of time, due to the constant header re-writing.
Get a second hard drive 80gb-120gb and format it before each capture.
No storage, certainly no editing, nothing.
Just capture.
Works for me
Will

[Will Hay]

Dave,
Despite what my computer spec states RAID 0 was no benefit to me either.
I split the array and use the two additional drives (other than my primary OS drive) independantly, one for storage and editing, the other for capture only.
Will

[i_am_dave]

Will,

Thanks for the input. I work with several people that swear RAID is the way to go. Maybe I'll just spend my money on the top of the line Processor and some cooling fans....
It is the encoding phase that takes the longest anyway. Faster drives would only improve rendering time and it doesn't take me more than 20-30 minutes to render a 2 hour segment.