Which way works best with multiple hdd's?

[jaybird]

I have a dual pentium III system with 1 gig of PC133 SDRAM.

Two hdd's, a 20 gig for OS's and software and a 60 gig unit for video storage and editing.

I thought I had a bad drive so to make a long story short I now have an extra 40 gig drive. I can:

Return it.

Slave it off the 20 gig unit for capture only.

Combine it Via RAID with 20 gig unit.

Slave it off 60 gig unit for video editing and DVD authoring.

Combine it Via RAID with 60 gig unit for video editing and DVD authoring.

Ideas PLEASE!

Regards,

jaybird

[Faustus]

My suggestion for that setup would be. Put teh 40gig as primary, 60 as secondary for video. Then get an external USB case for the 20gig and have an external/portable drive.

[rallynavvie]

You can't really combine non-identical drives in RAID. Also RAID would be useless. Having those drives seperate is gold. Use the fastest/newest one as your boot drive, another for capture, the third for encoding to and scratch space.

[InXess]

or buy a 200 GB for less then 100 bux, problem solved

[ROF]

or buy a 200 GB for less then 100 bux, problem solved

Better yet, return the hard drive, save a few more dollars and buy a modern system. The entire computing experience will benefit from such an upgrade.

[rallynavvie]

Actually that dual P3 system with that much memory would make a great file server. No need to get rid of such a machine. I have a similar board in a 1U at the bottom of my cabinet acting as my firewall/router.

[INFRATOM]

Don't spend a cent on that computer. In actuality you have a 300~500MHZ CPU not many programs use double cpu , so with most programs they just use one cpu. Also you need Win XP to take advantage of double CPU also P3 doesn't have some new CPU instruction to run programs faster. Sorry for video you need a P4 or better. A $299 dell would do better !

[rallynavvie]

SMP works just fine on legacy OS like 2000 and NT. Most software encoders I know of are SMP aware so it'll utilize both chips, though you won't see anything like double the performance of the single chip. More like 1.5-1.7x the speed depending on the platform.

With how cheap many pre-builts are getting you may be better off with one of those for video.

[crazy14muzic]

i have a dual p3 system just like him except for the ram. i am 256 shy of him. but for most applications i agree with infratom. i bought this in march of 02. to me it has seemed to hold its own. it is slow for video encoding but if i was to take out one of the processors it would be much slower. (2 brains are better than one) it takes about 6-8hours per 2 hour movie using dvd-rb. tmpg uses both chips 100% vegas uses both chips 100% cce im not sure about but i can say that when it is encoding it is between 60% - 75% cpu usage. i have the abit board which has raid capabilities straight from bios. i never really played around with it. i have however played with the striping tool in disk management win2k and xp. that i wasnt that impressed with. i am currently looking at a dual amd system since xeons are out of my price range.

as far as that extra drive, keep it and put it to use. ive built a few systems for friends and family. family members like my mom will never use a 120 gig or higher drive so the little guys are great for them.

i bought me a new 160 to add to my other 260 gigs of space that i had spread across other drives. one of them being a 160. well i captured an entire collection of tom and jerry cartoons from laserdisc to that spiffy new 160 drive. about 9 hours worth of dv avi. i had plenty of space right?! wrong!!!! i think that other 160 got jealous and crapped out on me. not leaving much room for anything else.

that was one time that i wished i had that 40 gig that i gave to my brother.

space is cheap if you havent bought it yet get the most for the money. you find deals everywhere. i just missed out on a 250 seagate for 79 bucks with instant rebates!!!!!!

[InXess]

space is cheap if you havent bought it yet get the most for the money. you find deals everywhere. i just missed out on a 250 seagate for 79 bucks with instant rebates!!!!!!

That's what I'm talking about
40 or 60 Gig? In todays environment none will give you what you're looking for. New drives are cheap, speedy and allow for more efficient space allocation. Worth looking into.

[Doramius]

It's hard to sell those lower capacity drives for a good price (unless its a 10,000RPM drive).

If you have an extra PCI slot get a cheap IDE card and turn the tower into a file storage device (as stated above). A machine like that is old school and not worth doing too much with other than storage. I'd yank out the optical & floppy drive, give it a basic keyboard & mouse. Make sure it has an ethernet port, and network it as such, storage. You'll benefit a lot more with an updated PC. You don't even have to buy a new optical or floppy drive.