What problems can arise with intermixing of video editing/apps/games/etc on one single partition or HD?

David, with PCs it is hard to say what will happen but from experience when I built my first editiing computer I had to start with a single SCSI drive as I ran out of cash and IDE ATA100/7200 drives were still 6-months away. I had everything together on one drive and my system was very unstable. I changed the OS from 98SE to NT and things improved a little. When the ATA100/7200 drives arrived I added one and my system was suddenly very smooth and stable. About the same time Win2000 came and I upgrade to that and haven't looked back since.

Well, I use WinXP Home now so that should be pretty stable.
What would you say the errors were? Were they seen on the camcorder or the transferring of DV back onto tape or what?

The thing is that I am just afraid that if my computer is too slow, it would somehow just screw up the camera when editing possibly causing any damage, if y'know what I mean. And possibly performance/image wise it would affect or damage permanently... :)))))

Also:

Over the past few months, I started to hear some noises and up to this day, I have not been able to identify the noise, but this is not the issue or concern. At first, I thought it would be my hard drive, but then I rechecked by opening the case and unplugging the molex connectors to the HD and it was fine, so it must be something else. My main concern right now is to ACTUALLY check if the HD is ok and up to status. I will be doing some major video editing within the next few weeks and I want my HD to be up to par and still good as poor HD performance can cause the unwanted errors during transferring/capturing/editing/such. Currently, I have a 80GB Western Digital with 2MB buffer. I want to know if there are actual programs or software to check the FULL status of your HD. I want to know if the rpm is up to speed (7200rpm which its suppose to be) and such statistics. I know there are programs like HDD Health, Drive Sitter, Drive Health which measures an estimation of the nearest date of failure, but I want to know if there are specific diagnostics to check if your HD is up to speed. I have defragmented the HD and do so about every month or two and tweaked some settings (like disabled system restore, index filing, etc)... Any suggestions on what programs to use or anything else to check?

I need to know if there will be any difference in quality of video captured with MovieShaker or any other capturing software, like pinnacle etc.

david,

you're too paranoid. just go and edit. if somn breaks then fix it! =). otherwise keep cutting away!

>>>What problems can arise with intermixing of video editing/apps/games/etc on one single partition or HD?<<<

it could be an issue mainly if it was all in the same hard drive, because the drive would have to be doing too many things at once.

ideally, you want the seperate hard drive for video only, so that it won't be interrupted for other tasks when it has to stream video to the camera.

you cannot hurt the camera because of the way the hard drives are set up... just watch closely for dropped frames when outputting the video stream to the camera.