OS on ATA or SATA ?

[VCDHunter]

My new PC will contain a 400gb SATA drive which I shall use for Video work. Should I create a small partition on this for the OS or carry on using the Seagate Barracuda for my OS ?

[enstg8er]

use the seagate ide foe the os. 7200 rpm drives are comparable in performance. theonly noticable sata boost would come from a raptor 10k drive. i personnaly would partition the os onto 20-25 gig.

[normcar]

It is always better to seperate your OS from your other HDs if possible. So if your OS has a problem, and you have to reload it, you have a better chance that you will not lose other data. It is also a lot faster if you encode from one HD to another HD, therefore you do not have to read and write to the same HD. This is the second best way to increase encoding speeds. The best way to a faster CPU.

[studtrooper]

Keep in mind that having seperate partitions on the system drive WILL slow performance down.

[rallynavvie]

Ah, it depends on how you're using the partition. Personally I don't like partitioning drives because I'm lazy. However our Pieces of Crap (or PCs) at work fail regularly and it's nice to have the OS on its own partition so we can repair it and be on our way. If there is a minute performance hit because of this (since the apps are on the same partition on the OS there can't be much of a loss since it's all in the same place on the platters) it is supeceded by the ease of repairing the OS volume when needed.

However in your case I'd just put the OS and apps on the smaller HDD and Ghost an image of that after a clean install as your repair, use the leftover room for more apps or scratch space. Given the massive size of your storage drive I'd even map my "My Documents" folder to the larger SATA drive. I agree that you won't see much difference in performance between the SATA and PATA 7200rpm drives. You may notice a difference if your SATA drive and your board support SATA2's NCQ tech and some of that, but probably not enough to warrant using such a large drive for your boot volume. I actually do the same thing you do, run a smaller (80GB) IDE drive as boot and a larger SATA (250GB) as my storage drive. Additionally I always have at least one scratch drive available as well.