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Need Help With New System--Setup is tomorrow

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dariushou1

Junior Member
Hello, any help with the following setup would be greatly appreciated. Here are my drives and the planned setup for tomorrow.

Hard Drives:

(4) Fujitsu 18.4GB 15K RPM ULTRA160 SCSI (MAM3184MP)(68 Pin)
(1) Seagate Cheetah 9.1GB Ultra160 SCSI (ST39205LC) (80 Pin)
(1) Fujitsu 9.1GB Ultra160 SCSI (MAH3091MC) (80 Pin)

SCSI Controllers:

(1) 3400s Adaptec Scsi 4 channel Ultra160 SCSI Raid Card
(2) 39160 Adaptec Ultra160 SCSI Card (2 independent Ultra160 Channels)

The Setup:

3 Fujitsu 18.4GB 15K RPM ULTRA160 SCSI drives on 3 of the channels on the 3400s in RAID 0. They will be partitioned with a 1.5 gig swap file first followed by partitions for apps, video, audio, games, etc?

The other channel on the 3400s card will be setup in RAID 0 consisting of:
(1) Seagate Cheetah 9.1GB Ultra160 SCSI (ST39205LC) (80 Pin)
(2) Fujitsu 9.1GB Ultra160 SCSI (MAH3091MC) (80 Pin)
These drives will be partitioned for video and audio spillover files.

As far the last drive (Fujitsu 18.4GB 15K RPM ULTRA160 SCSI) it will go on it?s on channel on the 39160 Adaptec Ultra160 SCSI Card. The operating system will be on this drive with a 1.5 gig partition.

Questions:

(1) I?ve never partitioned a drive before. I have partition magic 7.0. Do you partition before installing windows or after it is installed.
(2) Do I keep my data files for say photoshop or excel on a separate partition than where the apps are installed.
(3) This is my first time to setup a RAID Array also. Is it best to go ahead and install Windows XP and then set it up.
(4) Any comments on the hard drive placement and further setting up the partitions or any area of this setup for performance would be greatly appreciated.

Last note:
OS: WindowsXP
RAM: 1GB RIMM4200
CPU: P4 3.06Ghz
Lots of video editing, rendering, capturing. And the usual games, multitasking, etc?


Thanks in advance.
 
I'll try to answer all of your questions

1. You don't need Partition Magic to partition the drives(unless maybe they already have data on them) you can partition during the installation of Windows XP, or afterwards using XP's built-in Disk Management utility.

2. Having the data files on a different partition keeps things better organized and also it will be easier to recover those files if something happens to the partition where the apps are installed.

3. I have setup maybe 8-10 SCSI Raid arrays for businesses (I used to work for a network integration company) and we would always setup the Raid arrays before or as we were installing the operating system. Before is preferred if your hardware allows it. Usually as the system boots up it will display a few lines about each SCSI controller and also it usually tell you how to get into the setup (like CRTL-ALT-A, or something like that.)

Note you may still have to install some sort of extra driver in XP during the install if it doesn't see the arrays. If you setup the RAID array ahead of time and XP see's them fine then when it get to the point to partition the drives, each of the RAID 0 arrays will appear as a single drive. There is a place during the install where you can install additional device drivers.

4. As far as hard drive placement, providing you don't have some sort of hot-swap bay, I would just keep the related ones right next to each other.
 
1) You have to partition in some way before the OS can be installed. You can use Partition Magic to set up all your partitions ahead of time, or use the Windows setup program to make your first partition, then later you can create more partitions in Windows itself (using WindowsXP's Disk Management console). It's sort of like a cut-down Partition Magic. You could of course also use Partition Magic to modify/create partitions after you've installed Windows. If you use Windows setup to create the partition, it's slow, but you don't have any risk of compatibility issues; there are occasionally problems with partitions made by Partition Magic. My suggestion is to simply create your primary partition using WindowsXP's setup, creating it at whatever size you want your primary partition to be, then use Disk Management in XP to create any other partitions.

2) You'll get a lot of answers on this. I'll give my opinion. For the most part, it makes no difference, but it can make doing quick backups of your data files easier if they're on a separate partition, but not really any easier than if you just save them all to a specific folder. It really doesn't help any at all to keep your applications separate from your OS, since if you lose the OS, you have to reinstall the apps anyway. I would suggest that putting the applications you need to load on the same drive(s) that you're putting your swap file on would somewhat reduce the performance improvement of having the swap on a separate drive; the stuff that is going to need to go to the swap file is the same stuff that you're going to be accessing from that drive in the first place.

3) You should set up the RAID arrays using the controller before you install Windows, otherwise Windows will see several separate hard drives and initialize them that way, then when you shut down to create the RAID arrays, it'll detect it as a new hard drive. Basically just simpler to have the arrays set up ahead of time, so you can immediately do the partitioning and formatting.

4) No real comments on whether you could do it better. I would wonder about using different drive types in a RAID array, I'm not sure that's totally compatible, but I don't know that much about RAID.
 


Thanks for the input. So maybe i should put the apps on the same drive as the operating system--i'll probably partition them just for organization though. Then, just put my swap file and data files on the 3 disk RAID 0 ARRAY on the 3400s. Does this sound good?

I was leaning towards setting up my RAID and Partitions after windows, but after what yall two said, it sounds better to do it beforehand.


Any more suggestions?

 
any idea on the best stripesize and clustersize for the raid array? Most of my data files will be all over the place. A lot of video and audio though, which are in excess of 1MB.

I've also heard that "If you choose NTFS, it is not possible to change the clustersize without reformatting the drive. Therefore you should not choose to format the drive during OS install, since this will give you a default clustersize of 4K."

I plan on using NTFS
 
Any additional help would be appreciated.

By the way, you can ignore the comment "If you choose NTFS, it is not possible to change the clustersize without reformatting the drive. Therefore you should not choose to format the drive during OS install, since this will give you a default clustersize of 4K." I know how to get around that.
 
I've started formatting my drives on another machine before I install WinXP, so I can get the cluster size I want. How do you think you're going to get around it? Partition Magic can't change the size nor can most other apps I found. Only one rather expensive one could do it.
 
Here's how i plan on it and then i'll give you a step by step way that might apply to you.

My way: The OS is going to be on its on drive--not on the RAID so it shouldn't effect my 3 Drive RAID set up, right??

The real way that applies to most:

This here is the way to out-smart the W2K or XP installation routine, which always, by default, formats NTFS in 4k clusters. As a result you get your W2k/XP OS installed on a RAID 0 array with a NTFS file cluster size as you desire (and not only the default 4K).

1) After connecting the 2 disks to the RAID interface, power up, go into the RAID controller BIOS and set up a RAID 0 array with the desired stripe size, be it for the Highpoint controller (as we have it on Abit or Epox boards) 16K, 32K, or 64K, or in case of a Promise controller (Asus for example) 4K, 8K, 16K, 32K, 64K, 128K, 256K, 512K, and 1024K.

(2) Then you reboot and start installing W2K/XP. After properly loading the RAID controller driver from a prepared floppy by hitting "F6" at the beginning of the installation routine you arrive at the blue W2K/XP installation screen. It will ask you where to install W2k/XP. At that moment you have the choice to set up and format partitions. The problem is that you can only format in the default size of 4 K, which is not what we want. But this is what we do: you partition and format at least 2 drives: c:/ and d:/. The c:/ drive will later be used as the "real" installation drive for W2k/XP. The d:/ drive is where you install XP now as a temporary solution. Choose whatever size you wish for c:/ (it can later be changed) and give the temporary installation drive d:/ the minimum size you need for a proper XP installation, which is 2GB.

(3) Then you install W2k/XP on the d:/ drive. After the installation is completed, run W2k/XP and go to "My Computer", right click "Manage", call for "Disk Management" and RE-PARTITION and REFORMAT the empty c:/ drive (which was previously formatted with the default 4K cluster size) with the desired NTFS cluster size, be it 8K, 16K, 32K, or as maximum 64K. Make SURE to format c:/ as PRIMARY partition and set it ACTIVE afterwards. Then you reboot and re-peat the W2K/XP installation process. But this time, when arriving at the partition screen, you will tell W2K/XP to delete the d:/ drive with the temporary W2k/XP installation. Then you install W2k/XP fresh on the already existing c:/ drive, which you previously formatted in the desired cluster size.

This works 100%. It is, as far as I know, the only way for ppl. with only 2 disks to format a RAID 0 array in NTFS in another than the default 4k cluster size. And 4K is NO good for RAID 0 performance, as everybody who has read through this thread knows by now

 
I haven't used RAID enough to have any clue about stripe size and cluster size. Most everyone on here probably uses whatever "defaults" there may be when they use on-board IDE RAID.
 
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