Questions About a New System I Built

[Soopafresh]

Just put together a new system, (E8400, 2GB RAM) and installed 2 physical drives - 1x500GB SATA and 1x1TB SATA.

1) The DVD burner is also SATA, which I've never had before. Anything to be aware of during the XP (SP2) installation? I'm concerned about a Catch-22, where I need the DVD drive to copy and install the Windows install disk, yet the SATA driver isn't included to support the installation portion (hope that was somewhat clear).

2) As far as partitioning, I'm thinking 3x500GB partitions - one on the physical 500 and 2 on the 1TB drive. Is there a performance hit with partitions this large ?

[Jim44]

1) The DVD burner is also SATA, which I've never had before. Anything to be aware of during the XP (SP2) installation? I'm concerned about a Catch-22, where I need the DVD drive to copy and install the Windows install disk, yet the SATA driver isn't included to support the installation portion (hope that was somewhat clear).

If it's a new-ish motherboard, it shouldn't be a problem.

(This was/is a problem with my MB in the system I built 4 years ago or so, and I had to exchange the SATA DVD for a PATA.)

[redwudz]

I've put together two systems in the last couple of months that use all SATA drives, including optical, and no problems with booting or installing the OS from the DVD drive. Of course it's usually advisable to unhook all but one DVD/CD drive and the boot drive before installing the OS, just to avoid possible conflicts.

With a few older motherboards, I've even had problems with using a SATA boot drive, or mixing SATA and PATA hard drives, but they seemed to resolved all that now. They required you to load in a SATA driver with a floppy drive before installing the OS. And one particular Asus MB would lose the boot .ini if I removed one of the secondary hard drives. (NTLDR is missing...). Then I had to put the OS disc back in and that would cure it. A real PITA.

EDIT: I'm not a fan of multiple partitions, but with very large drives, your divisions seem about right to me. I doubt their size will have any effect on performance, though I would rather have a smaller size drive for the boot drives, irregardless of the partitioning. I had limited hard drive physical space in my HTPC, so I did split the boot drive to 100GB and 220GB partitions, (320GB) along with a single 320GB partition for the second HDD.

[Soopafresh]

Thanks, fellas. I'll give it a shot this evening.

[budz]

Just put together a new system, (E8400, 2GB RAM)

You bought a Wolfdale E8400! I'm jealous! :wink:
Nah, you shouldn't have any problems with installing XP with a SATA DVD BURNER with a newer model motherboard. Only problem I'd see if you were using a VIA CHIPSET mobo then the SATA DVD BURNER won't work correctly.

[Soopafresh]

You bought a Wolfdale E8400! I'm jealous!

I'm hoping it's a step up from my P4 2.4GHZ machine

[ronnylov]

Actually you may have a performance hit by creating too big partition for the OS. The highest performance of a hard drive is when the data is located on the physical outer edge of the discs. The first created partition on a hard drive is placed on the outer edge. The performance slowly decrease when the disc is filled towards the inner edge of the disc.

The OS partition should be fast and not larger than necesessary for OS and programs, I think something like 60 GB should be enough. Maybe you can extend it to 100 GB on your big TB drive without a performance hit.

On the other side your second 500 GB partition will be slower than the first so you can use this one for storage of files that does not need to be read very fast, like music and movies, documents, pictures.

I suggest splitting the TB drive to 100 GB, 400 GB and 500GB and the 500 GB a single 500 GB partition.

By the way I am also building a new PC (upgrading from AMD X2 3800+).
The CPU is a Intel Xeon X3350 45 nm quad core processor (same as Q9450 actually), 4GB RAM and I will use a new WD 640 GB drive for booting and this drive will be split to 64 GB (OS), 100 GB (documets and downloads) and 500 GB (Video). Let's do the videohelp video encoding benchmark when we are finnished installing!

[Soopafresh]

Thanks ronny, I'll try that out.

Well, the OS installation was completely painless. The SATA DVD drive (Pioneer) is fast. The CPU is peppy. budz, I'll post that x264 benchmark test with the E8400 and the Q6600 chip which I have on some PCs at work.

[bigstusexy]

ronnylov, Partitions are not created outside in, they start inside out, the same way tracks are numbered.

While it is true that the outer tracks of a disk spins faster and allows the system to access more data quickly because of its higher speed. it is also further way from where the head will rest and has longer access times.

I also have never experienced or read of problems with the OS partition size bother performance.

Another thing you may or may not want to try is if you run a single drive for your system is putting programs on another drive or array. I won't suggest doing the whole program files folder as its complicated but you can either just install to a different drive (not partition) or mount a drive as a directory.

If hd speed is an issue the best way to go is an array with a properly set strip size.

[ronnylov]

CD and DVD are inside-out but hard discs are outside-in. So the first partition will have the highest transfer speed. You can also see this if you run a benchmark like HDTach where the transfer speed is highest at the beginning and then decreases towards the end.

Another reason to keep system partition small is that defragmentation programs will defrag the OS drive faster.

I did a mistake in my calculation above (640 GB hard disc can not have 664 GB data). I have reconsidered and now I have made a 40 GB WinXP partition and will also make a 60 GB Windows Vista x64 partition so I can dual boot. Then 400 GB for video files and the rest for documents, downloads, music files and stuff. I plan to use 3 hard drives and the other two will be source and destination drives for video editing. Video editing is much faster if source files and destination files are on different physical drives. I will not bother with RAID because I don't think it will make things much faster (compared to have source and destination files on separate drives).

I had no problems when installing XP from a SATA DVD-drive on this setup. I also noticed that my new 9600GT graphics card became much more silent after installing the video drivers. That was a relief because it was too much noisy before loading windows.