320gb SATA: do a partition or not?
 

I´m finishing to build my new NLE. The HD will be a WD 320gb SATA. My question is: do I make a partition or not? The partition will only help me with organization or can improve my NLE´s performance? Considering I will use Windows XP, if partition is the best option, what kind should I use? And how many partitions should I make?

Gustavo:

If you do a search, this topic has been covered before. Probably search for "partition".

2- If your are putting Windows onto the 320GB, you will get small advantages in partitioning it.

I suggest making 3 partitions:
The first for windows. Having windows on its own partition makes windows easier to re-install, because you don't have to wipe off the entire partition. Make this partition 15gb-20GB if you aren't going to move program files off.
The second for documents, small files, (program files, my documents), etc.
The third for your video projects. Don't keep little files here as they will cause fragmentation. Put those files onto the second partition.

If you want to get really advanced, move the page file onto the third partition right away and set the maximum pagefile size to equal the minimum pagefile size (2GB should be fine). This avoids fragmentation and puts the pagefile at around the optimal position on the drive (the middle).


Other people have different answers.

I recommend getting 3 drives instead. Keep the 320 for video store, get an 80gb for OS and apps, and get another 200+GB drive for render. Partitioning can actually degrade performance. Partitioning a drive allows you to reinstall the OS by formatting that partition without deleting media there.

George: I don't think having 3 drives makes ANY difference over just two.

Two drives (one for OS, the other for video) may be better than just one. But I believe many people are able to run off just one drive. Look at all the laptop users... they can edit DV on a 4200rpm laptop drive.

I have one (a laptop). There are many other factors, but playback while editing and background rendering is vastly different between my workstation and laptop. But they are vastly different.

My NLE renders in the background, so having source on one, target on another and OS on the third makes sense. I have not run perfmon disk performance to verify it though. Consider though that Photoshop benefits from a scratch drive.

George, are you running Edition? That may be a case where having 2/3 drives would help.

I don't use it, so I can't test it so I wouldn't know.

Yes. OS on C:, Video (Media) on E:, Render on F:. Render happens in the background while I am still editing (writing to F:, reading from E:).

What about reading from D: or E: and writing to C: (OS/applications drive)?
Would you know if that would be just as fast?

C: has size issues regarding video - <70GB (Raptor pair). About half of my major projects are monsters. 24 reels on the current (Drums Corps season video), expecting about the same on the next (3-4 camera marching band competition).

If you use C: for renders, it wouldn't need more than ~30GB of space for that purpose?

2- In practice, maybe it's better to get a 80GB/120GB 7200rpm drive? I don't think 10k rpm is all that much faster in practice (in practice, not benchmarks).

On 2 - Not a good comparison, but my set with 2 Raptors, 3.06 533 Xeons, and 1 GB booted faster than a HP 3.2 800 dual, 1 250 SATA, 4GB. Not a good comparison because of drivers, but similar load structure in devices. But it proves NOTHING.

Maybe, on ~30Gb. But only have 20GB free at the moment with all the tools and garbage (apps, dev tools, a couple of games) I have loaded. Still wanted paging file, render, and video source seperate. It does allow me to be a little lack on media management (I should say less agressive.)

Most rendering operations will be 0% faster with two drives over one in today's average desktop. For DV, and particularly MPEG2/MPEG4 encoding there is no question that the bottleneck is the CPU. Your one drive will be idling, waiting for the CPU. I've tested a number of scenarios on my 2.8Ghz workstation.

The difference with two SATA or UDMA133 drives is however very noticeable if you are, for example, editing a timeline with multiple video streams at the same time...particularly in terms of a real time preview. Having two or more drives is also nice if like many, you're not sitting and waiting during renders.

To me it's much more an issue of storage space than performance. I also can't see much of a difference from the hardware side in partitioning a drive. You still have an IDE drive chatting to your motherboard through an essentially serial pipe on one channel. Two pipes and two controllers does make a difference when the water's flowing..but for most DV operations the river's pretty much a trickle. Of course if your workflow incorporates HD, then strap on your lifejacket and start paddling like hell.

Just for clarity, I was not referring to rendering of DV to MPEG. During ops, I may have a color correction, effect (including move, resize, transition, time 'warp'), or format change on the timeline while editing. Those renders are what I am referring to. That also includes Ken Burns to 5MP stills for a 720p slideshow (been playing with that off and on.) That operation is the first I have done that can take both processors (well 4 if you include the HT) to 100%.