Unusual Ripping Problem

29th Dec 2006 10:50 #31

The Mustang King

Two quick things to consider after installing the 2nd hard drive

1) Make sure you immediately turn off drive monitoring (if using windows xp ) on the new drive. If you dont, it will allocate some space on that drive to attempt to save deletes and old versions which only applys to a system drive

2) Make sure you DONT use the default 4k blocks for the block size when you initialize and format the new drive. That MAY or MAY NOT have been part of the problem with the old situation.

What does blksize do ? It allocates chunks for files. If you write alot of small word doc kind of files then smaller block sizes is fine , in fact , is desirable. If you do that type of work, having larger block sizes means every time you write say a 1 k file, it would allocate a larger size whether you need it or not. Say , you set it to 128k or 512k. That means to write a file that is even 2 k , you will automatically get a 128k file or 512k. Not efficient.

Conversely though, if you do video, you want larger blksizes. why ? Because video likes larger, contiguous files. if you have a 4meg file, you dont want it broken into 1000 4K fragments ....you want it to find a large space. But if as on your C; drive you have many fragments...thats exactly what it will do. So if drive # 2 is going to be for video stuff, make the default blksize LARGE. It will keep things clean. Think about it. I think I have mine set for 4096 but 1024 might be good also. I do alot of video capture, render, etc.

Also take a peak at this article about pagefile and about defrag
http://www.videomaker.com/article/10974/

I am not trying to be a disk expert in any sense of the wrod but after much background as well as real life trial and error, my I/O to disks runs pretty smooth. I can literally do video editting and burn disks and print and surf the net....All at the same time. I have 8 hard drives in my box (4 in a raid array 2 by 2) ...and the speed for IO is pretty impressive...I will admit though to a recent slowdown because after several months of neglect I let my C: drive get to 30 % fragmented..ugggghhh..LOL

Good luck and thanks to all on your patience with my long replies..