Best practice setting up new harddrive

[Deacon Blues]

If this has been covered before, please direct me to the thread. I search did not find it.

I have got a new 160GB harddrive because my current 80GB is filling up and causing the performance to lag and one of the partitions to have errors with defraging.
My 80Gb drive is divided into two equal partitions. Luckily, its the second partition that is having problem and not the one with my WinXP and programs installed.
I intend to move the stuff off of it and reformat it.

But now having a brand new drive... I want to set it up for best performance. How do you guys do it?

1) I suppose I should dedicate a partition to the system files and programs alone... with free space for them to run in. Or should programs have their own partition too?

2) Can I increase/decrease space in a partition if it already hsa files on it, like system files? I have the system curently on a 37GB partition with personal files on it. I intend to move the personal files to another partition so as to give the system and programs dedicated room. But I wont need 37GB for that... I can I decrease space from system partition to increse in the other partition?

3) I do extensive video and image editing... Would the best way be to create a special partition for editing, then wehn finished move the files to a storage partition, on so as not to degrade the whole harddrive? Or will it not matter?

4) Should I set up a seperate partition for the pagefile on the new drive?


Any other tips for setting up a new harddrive? Remember, I focus on high-end editing.

Thanks,
DBlues

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Deacon Blues
If this has been covered before, please direct me to the thread. I search did not find it.

I have got a new 160GB harddrive because my current 80GB is filling up and causing the performance to lag and one of the partitions to have errors with defraging.
My 80Gb drive is divided into two equal partitions. Luckily, its the second partition that is having problem and not the one with my WinXP and programs installed.
I intend to move the stuff off of it and reformat it.

But now having a brand new drive... I want to set it up for best performance. How do you guys do it?

1) I suppose I should dedicate a partition to the system files and programs alone... with free space for them to run in. Or should programs have their own partition too?

Probably not terribly helpful in terms of performance. The reason to put the OS/apps on its own partition is so that if you want/need to reinstall or change OSes, you don't have to format the whole drive. It may also help reduce fragmentation of data/media files if they are on a separate partition. This might be relevant if you are planning on filling all (or nearly all) of the available space while doing editing work.

2) Can I increase/decrease space in a partition if it already hsa files on it, like system files? I have the system curently on a 37GB partition with personal files on it. I intend to move the personal files to another partition so as to give the system and programs dedicated room. But I wont need 37GB for that... I can I decrease space from system partition to increse in the other partition?

Only with software like PartitionMagic. Windows can't do this on its own (you may be able to expand a partition if it's dynamic, but you certainly can't shrink one).

3) I do extensive video and image editing... Would the best way be to create a special partition for editing, then wehn finished move the files to a storage partition, on so as not to degrade the whole harddrive? Or will it not matter?

For serious video editing, you would want multiple scratch drives, so that you can be reading from one and writing to another when you are editing clips (if you copy from one file on a drive to another file on the same drive, you end up thrashing badly rather than being able to write continuous blocks of data). Using multiple partitions on the same drive won't really help, since you'll just force the drive to seek back and forth between them.

4) Should I set up a seperate partition for the pagefile on the new drive?

I doubt this is worth it. You might check out some of the threads in the Operating Systems forum on this topic.

Also, high-end video editing is one of the few things that might actually benefit from RAID0 and/or 10KRPM/15KRPM SCSI drives.

 

[Deacon Blues]

Thanks Matthias for a detailed answer.

However:

For serious video editing, you would want multiple scratch drives, so that you can be reading from one and writing to another when you are editing clips (if you copy from one file on a drive to another file on the same drive, you end up thrashing badly rather than being able to write continuous blocks of data). Using multiple partitions on the same drive won't really help, since you'll just force the drive to seek back and forth between them.

1) Whats is a scratch drive? Googling it sheds no light.

2) I don't get the part in brackets. I won't be copying from one file to another. I will simply be editing video files. Or is that the same thing?

3) What do you mean by "thrashing"? Seeing a decrease in performance?



4) You do not recommend partitioning? Won't that make slow scanning of a 160GB drive? Like when you open up explorer, or an "opend document" box in an app. Drives have to be scanned before displayed, and if there is 100GB of stuff, won't that be slow?

Thanks,

 

[bigpow]

1) for windows paging file - unneccessary, unless its on different physical drive
2) no comment
3) lots of noise & HDD lights, hour-glass cursor
4) not really

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Deacon Blues
Thanks Matthias for a detailed answer.

However:

For serious video editing, you would want multiple scratch drives, so that you can be reading from one and writing to another when you are editing clips (if you copy from one file on a drive to another file on the same drive, you end up thrashing badly rather than being able to write continuous blocks of data). Using multiple partitions on the same drive won't really help, since you'll just force the drive to seek back and forth between them.

1) Whats is a scratch drive? Googling it sheds no light.

Evidently you're much less serious about video editing than I thought. 😛

What I mean is that, when you are editing a project, ideally you want to have multiple physical drives that can be used to store files as you are editing them. These are often referred to as 'scratch' or 'temp' storage.

2) I don't get the part in brackets. I won't be copying from one file to another. I will simply be editing video files. Or is that the same thing?

Well, whenever you 'edit' something, there must be an output file, and at least one input file. You will get better performance if the output file is on its own drive (not just its own partition).

3) What do you mean by "thrashing"? Seeing a decrease in performance?

Specifically I am referring to the phenomeon where, if you are reading and writing data simultaneously in two different parts of the same physical drive, the heads must seek repeatedly back and forth, severely hurting throughput. If you are able to have one drive just reading and one drive just writing, you will get much better performance, since far fewer seeks will be required (assuming the reads and writes are then mostly sequential).

4) You do not recommend partitioning? Won't that make slow scanning of a 160GB drive? Like when you open up explorer, or an "opend document" box in an app. Drives have to be scanned before displayed, and if there is 100GB of stuff, won't that be slow?

I do not necessarily recommend a separate partition for just your swapfile. If you intend to largely fill the 160GB drive with video files (and/or edit a lot of large video files), putting the OS in a separate partition may help prevent fragmentation of the files.

 

[xit2nowhere]

Putting your pagefile on a different physical drive is a good way to improve performance, from what i remember reading.

 

[Deacon Blues]

Evidently you're much less serious about video editing than I thought.

Well, you can't know everything 😉... I'm not a proffesional studio to afford multiple disks to work with. You can check out my site if you wish, and decide wether I'm serious enough: Paintful.net

2) Is it safe to combine partitions? Or is it risky... I hear lots about Partition Magic going wrong. Is that a norm?


I'm going ahead and creating 2 partitions... one to do alot of work on( so I can defrag it faster) and one general with the pagefile on it.