HELP!! HARD DRIVE QUESTION

[RappWizard]

I purchased and installed a Western Digital 120 GB hard drive this week, in large part to be able to improve the multi-media functions on my computer, especially video editing.
I am coming to the realization that instead of having two hard drives(configured as master and slave) maybe I'm better off just copying all the files and operating system over to the new hard drive and make that the only hard drive in order to fully take advantage of the size and speed of this drive. I just wanted to get some feed back from other video enthusiasts on what hard drive configurations you are happy with. Thanks for your help.

[Tommyknocker]

If your new hard drive is the fastest, I would try to leave your OS on the slow drive and use the fastest one for capturing and processing video?

[davy19]

I am not an expert on VCD and editing video, but can tell you that your hard drive will always be at its fatest when it is the only drive on the IDE Channel.

So it is best just have to one drive.

[KingJohn]

I purchased and installed a Western Digital 120 GB hard drive this week, in large part to be able to improve the multi-media functions on my computer, especially video editing.
I am coming to the realization that instead of having two hard drives(configured as master and slave) maybe I'm better off just copying all the files and operating system over to the new hard drive and make that the only hard drive in order to fully take advantage of the size and speed of this drive. I just wanted to get some feed back from other video enthusiasts on what hard drive configurations you are happy with. Thanks for your help.

Some people put the new drive on the same lead at the old one, this can slow down the new one, if its taking its timing from it. You cannot just copy across your system, you may have lots of problems. Use Norton ghost to do the work of transferring from your old drive to the new one.

[LeeBear]

With IDE drives, only one request can be made to each channel at a time. For example if you have both hard drive on the same channel (one master, one slave) and you try to copy a file from one drive to the other it basically reads from one drive, stops, writes to the other drive, stops, reads from the first drive, etc, etc. As you can see very ineffecient but it has to do this because the IDE bus protocol doesn't allow for you to access both drives on the same channel at the same time.

Now if you had the drives on seperate channels (one on the primary channel and one on the secondary channel) your copy process would be a constant read from one drive and a constant write to the other drive... much faster and effecient. This also applies to CDROMs and DVD's, so if you rip alot of DVD's you want your DVD-ROM to be on a different channel then the hard drive you are ripping too.

-LeeBear

[RappWizard]

O.K. Thanks for the advice. Sounds like at the very least I need to create separate drives. Is there an advantage to keeping the OS on the slower drive versus just using the new 120GB drive as the only drive? It just seems like it gets sort of confusing to constantly have to distinguish the different tasks to different drives.
I do have one other question which might make things easier for me. I put my Vegas Video editing program on the new drive and yet files are being captured to the C drive (I know you are asking why I made the new drive the slave drive but I was having problems configuring the drives at the time and that turned out to be the easiest way to get my system booted back up before my wife learned I screwed up the computer.)
Anyway if I create separate channels for the two drives will my multi media tasks(i.e. video editing projects) be captured automatically to the new drive and not to the C-Drive. Thanks again for the advice>

[fonoop]

I have no experiance with vegas video, but you should be able to tell it where you want the video to capture. As for the hard drive thing, I personally use two hard drives, one for windows and one for video editing. The video editing hard drive crashed a few days ago, but I'm still in business becuase I have a sperate windows hard drive. Just glad I backed up all my dv videos onto 30 cds a week before it crashed.