question re: partitioned hard discs

[Adi Head]

most of the computer specs i've seen for nle had more than one hard disc. one usually for the operating system (around 40GB) and the other for video storage (80GB, 120GB, or more).

if for starters, i want 80GB of storage, couldn't i just get ONE hard disc of 120GB, have it partitioned? isn't a partitioned hard disc the same as two seperate discs?

[K. Forman]

That's not recommended, for various reasons, namely speed. You are better off having the second drive.

[Andre De Clercq]

A partitioned disc is still controlled by the same controller (master and slave) and this can result in longer access times and thus "speed" reduction of the system.

[Jan Roovers]

Adi

You can test the performance of yr disk on this site:

<URL>http://www.pcpitstop.com/pcpitstop/default.asp</URL>

You can see if the uncached speed is enough.

Be sure to have the video disk well defragemented for satisfying results when capturing video.

Jan

[Garret Ambrosio]

Arghhh, I hate to go against the crowd but I think you guys may have this one wrong. If you partition a drive, this doesn't slow down the HDD. In fact quite the opposite will happen, since you are essentially you are taking the physical drive and breaking it up into smaller logical drives. This may strain your primary partition a bit, but it should hardly be noticeable. The partition will fly because it doesn't need to access the whole drive in order to access the data that is resident in a logical partition.

In fact the optimal configuration for a Windows machine, would be to create a smaller OS partition which is decicated to the OS and the OS alone and create a specific partition for the Paging or Swap file. This will optimize the paging file read writes.

But, now this is the but, for video it is more efficient to use a dedicated drive outside of the OS drive because of what people here have explained, on the physical, hardware level, video taxes the hardware in order to maintain data rate to allow constant frame rate and quality. It is even more benefitial to use a different bus (secondary IDE or RAID card) for use in Video or CD-Burning.

Here's the second but, but if your OS is NOT having to access the paging file or the OS directory often during capture or playback or rendering, you will however can get good performance using as you propose a single drive using three partitions, one for the OS, one for the paging file and the tertiary for video. You can acheive this by adding 1.5 GB or more of RAM which will have enough free ram to accomodate the OS requirements and paging will be less or not necessary. Having a large L2 as in the Barton Core AMD chips or the Intel Zenon can help assure that the paging file is rarely hit and the OS will have enough space in the RAM.

[Adrian Douglas]

Adi,

basically, what everyone here is saying is correct. For my NLE machine I have one HDD running the OS/Apps on on partition (c: - 4GB), any other files (non-video) on a second partition (f: - 9GB) and a third partition for the swap/page file (x: -1.5GB - 3x the installed 512MB RAM). For the video files I have a seperate SCSI disk on a PCI SCSI controller. Now, this system was built 3 years ago before ATA100 drives were available, you don't need a SCSI drive unless you plan to do uncompressed (Beta SP/SX Digibeta etc) editing, but the point is to build a stable, high-performance video system you are best off using a second hard drive for your video files only.

The same goes for laptop editing. You can edit successfully on a laptop with a partitioned drive, I do with my Dell Inspiron, to gain max performance and reliability it is best to use an external firewire drive for the video media.

[Alex Taylor]

I agree with Garret, paritioned drives would perform better as they don't need to read the whole hard drive at once. It's probably not a big issue now with NTFS but back in the days of FAT16 drives, partitioning made storage more efficient; the way hard drives store files with older file systems, there was a great deal that wasn't being used efficiently because the HD stores data in equal-sized clusters.

Anyway, the optimal setup would be a separate drive for your OS and video capture, on a different IDE channel or even RAID if you can swing it.

[Garret Ambrosio]

Alex, definitely, a Raid 0 or Striping can triple the space and double access times. Great way to go.

[Andre De Clercq]

Garret, I am not convinced that I "got it wrong" . Paritioned disc for video is the wrong way to go and reduces "speed"as a whole. Swapping ,which, given the cheap rams can easely be avoided by setting it "off" in the registry. The amount needed for a given application can allway be verified . I did this 2 years ago for my NLE. So swapping in an old fashioned method for video. Unfortunately there are other running systems on a PC that want to access the OS...which makes continious R/W more difficult and give a negative influence on the "speed" performance of the system

[Lars Siden]

Hello Adi,

I would say that it depends on HOW you're using the computer. If you multitask some other programs while running the NLE, I would recommend to have system and NLE on different discs not just separate partitions. That is mainly because if you are writing to partion 2 where the NLE is stored while you're reading on partion 1, you heads on the HDD will move back & forth alot and degrading the speed.

One other thing to keep in mind is having a "small" system partion ( and by small I mean < 10 gb ), you could install the system with all its drivers and your most used programs. Take a ghost copy of the system partion....and then when the system is infected by a virus or just behaves strange & slow...you can "ghost"-back your system partiotion in perfect order.

Just my 2$...

// Lazze

ps. You can ghost to another HDD, like an extern FW/USB2 disc ds.

[Lars Siden]

Garret,

>Alex, definitely, a Raid 0 or Striping can triple the space and >double access times. Great way to go.

Not to be picky, but sure you mean

1. Halve the access time
2. Double the space... striping is just 2 discs.

When striping - do keep in mind that you double the risk of dataloss. To be on the safe side, go for Raid 1+0, uses 4 discs but then you get mirror + stripe

// Lazze

ps. Can recommend the following sites for reading up on HDD:s and raid:

http://www.tomshardware.com/
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/
http://www.storagereview.com/

ds.

[Garret Ambrosio]

Lars. striping can be done with 2 or more identical disks to prevent wasted space. I've always striped 3 or more for the capacity (size of the smallest drive int he array* thenumber of drives) Access times usually ~double because the stripe is written throughout all the HDDs. Yes, you are right there is no fault tolerance when it comes to RAID 0. but that's the give and take. You can select RAID 1+0 or RAID 10, but like you said you would have a mirrored stripe. Raid level 5 would be ideal, but then you would give up performance. so they all have their give and take. But I agree with you, about how the system is used when partitioning HDDs. As I indicated, depends on your demands of your PC, but partitioning can be done optimal in certain types of applications and usage.

[Dylan Couper]

Just buy two seperate HD's. That way if one smokes, you still have the other.

[Lars Siden]

Garret,

Sorry, of course you're right.... You may stripe X numbers of drives... I was drunk or tired...or both ;-)

Today I'd a lovely day ...decided it was finally time for re-install. So I spent my day getting all the drivers back in place...and updates...and programs... but the machine feels much healthier and quicker now...for a while until next time *s*

// Lazze