Seperate HDD's v Partition - help?
 

Hiya. OK, spec-heads unite!
I'm probably getting the following components as upgrade:
Really appreciate some advise.

-DVD-RW Internal: 16x+ / 12x- Dual Layer
-PowerColor R98-PC3 9800PRO 128MB DVI 256Bit w/ CS:CZ
-Corsair 2x 512MB 1024MB Dual Channel Optimised Pair
-Intel P4-3.0E/800 CPU: Desktop P4 HT 1MB S478 Prsctt w/fan
-MSI 875P Neo-FISR S478 Intel 875P NEO-FISR Motherboard
-Antec TruePower AT430W

HDD: One party has suggested that I mirror 2 x 200GB 7200rpm 8Mb Cache Barracuda Seagate and partition off the OS.
Now I've always heard that it literally crucial to have Osystems on a separate drive to DV storage.
Is partitioning enough? make any difference?
If it's not a HUGE no-no, I might just go wit hthe partition, and get another drive later if there's an issue.

What you think? Any links known re this topic?

Thanks a million

i am constantly amazed at how many people out here want to mirror hard drives in order to edit mini-dv footage.

just get a seperate dedicated hard drive for your dv footage, put it on it's own seperate ide channel, and format it with the biggest ntfs sector size you can... it'll work great.

Partitioning: I would partition off your hard drive just to make windows re-installation easier. You want something like a 15GB windows partition (program files can take a lot of space!!!).

Seperate drives aren't really necessary as long as you keep your system clean of viruses and spyware. If you don't know about spyware then you might want to consider leaving your computer off the internet (or not browsing with it).

2-
DVD burner: Nec 3500a and the pioneer drives seem to get the most recommendations. Both 16X with dual layer capability, and good media compatibility.

Video card: If you don't need the 3d acceleration (many NLEs can't take advantage of it) then look at a cheaper card. If this is just for compositing uses, look at an openGL card (quadro, fire lines).

RAM: With Vegas Video, better RAM makes no difference on performance. I would get the cheapest stuff and test it with memtest86 or microsoft's RAM tester or prime95's torture test overnight.

Brand name stuff might be less likely to be DOA... kingston, mushkin, corsair, crucial, etc.

CPU: Could go with something a lil faster (render speed is heavily dependent on CPU speed), but the 3.0ghz is still excellent bang for the buck.

Motherboard: Save money by going with the 865 chipset. The 875 has PAT (no effect on video performance, ~2-5% difference for other things), supports ECC RAM, and supports CSA LAN (the last two unnecessary).
Abit, MSI, Asus have good offerings as do other manufacturers.

Power supply: You could save money with a 300W/350W+ Sparkle or Fortron PSU (don't get the Sparkle powerQ stuff). You really don't need that much wattage, you just need power supplies without fudged wattage ratings (those effectively deliver less wattage).

Thank you for giving feedback!

I thought I was so close to purchasing.. now more to consider ..oh the pain of it all!!

Thanks again.
hope there's more input too!

I would definately go with at least two hard drives. You only need a small one for the OS. The advantage is that Windows accesses the hard drive ALL the time and for export or capture it is important to have the video hard drive doing NOTHING else but the task of video. IS it possible to have just one drive? ...sure. BUt it is a lot better to have more than one. I currently have 6!!!. One for the OS and applications, one for ALL the temp/preview files and the rest for storage. For multi camera shoots I make sure the files from different cameras are on different hard drives. This way the drives are only having to deal with 3.5MBs at least 6 times less than the sustained rate off the drive even if they are full and management and cleanup are a lot easier. Besides hard drives are cheap now. Get a cheap video card and buy another hard drive. Don't bother partitioning the drives just clean them up regularly. IF you have a small OS drive it is easy to back up and is fast to defrag. Use directories for projects on the video drives so that it is also easy to cleanup.
I currently have MSI NEo FIS2r, AMD XP2500Barton, 40G boot/applications, 80G temp another 80g general storage/DVD image files, 120G storage( these 3 on Promise PCI IDE controller) and two 160G SATA. All are Maxtors. Video card is a Sapphire Radeon7000, Canopus DVRaptor RT2 , Panasonic DVD writer. Boot drive by itself on IDE1 and Panasonic burner by itself on IDE2. Software WinXP, Premiere 6.5 and Pro 1.5, Vegas LE, Womble MPEG editor, DVDLab, Sound Forge, Nero and Photoshop. Power management/screen savers etc. disabled.

Ron Evans

I've successfully editing off one hard drive. It's not a big deal anymore since hard drives are faster now.

A drive for temporary files is pretty unnecessary. IMO you are much better off having lots of hard drive space. The extra space means you won't be in trouble if you run out, and it can also be used to archive projects.

The small WD Raptor is the bomb for C drive, or get the bigger one and partition it. The thing about a nice 20 gig partition, or even better a small fast drive (34 gig drive as in the case of the raptor) is the it is super easy to backup. You get your system tweaked the way you like it. Ghost it. Anything happens to your C drive, -bing bong your back in business in no time. All your precious data (video, audio, love letters) is elsewhere. Imagine the time you spent configuring that system. Save the big mamas for video and audio.

You can't go wrong with a raptor imho, fast, 5 year warranty.

in a perfect world, you'd want multiple drives for things like putting most of the windows swapfile somewhere other than the c: drive... photoshop in particular likes the swapfile on a seperate drive, because it'll give faster overall performance.

same thing with having a seperate dedicated video drive... anytime you can render between two drives for things like mpeg encoding, it should give a slight speed improvement.

there is also the efficiency improvement that comes with bigger sector sizes on huge drives... you really don't want a 250 gig drive to be using the smallest sector sizes for video, because video files are huge... but the operating system drive has all kinds of file sizes, so smaller sectors are what you want there.