cjohnsonuk
Junior Member
I'm looking to upgrade my PC to make it a bit quicker for video editing. I currently have a 8GB system drive with Windows 2k on it and a 18GB data drive (NTFS) with 256MB RAM and an Athlon 500.
I'm looking at getting a Athlon 2000+ (any bigger and the cost per %improvement is to big) on a Gigabyte 7VAXP motherboard with 256MB DDR333 memory and an 80GB data drive. (DDR400 memory is too expensive, I'll upgrade to 512MB memory at some point when funds allow). I intend to use my current 18GB drive as a system drive (and non video data). I intend to install Windows XP pro.
Now my proposal for making it a bit faster. The video software (Pinnacle studio 7) manual suggests defragging the disks and making sure the swap (page) file is contiguous. As the board supports Raid 0 and I have a couple of spare 3GB ish (I think they're UDMA66) hard drives lying around I thought I'd install them as a raid 0 striped pair and put my swap file on them and only my swap file on them so I don't get problems with the swap files becoming non contiguous.
Has anybody else done this?
Would I get much improvement in speed (the drives are slower)?
What software (preferably free or trial) should I use to benchmark my system before and after that would test for the sort of data transfer I'd be using in digital video editing?
If I wasn't going to use the old disks in raid would it be quicker to have the swap file on the data disk (with all my video footage) or on the system disk (with all the application files)?
How do I move the location of the swap file in windows XP Pro?
Hoping for a better solution
ChrisJ
I'm looking at getting a Athlon 2000+ (any bigger and the cost per %improvement is to big) on a Gigabyte 7VAXP motherboard with 256MB DDR333 memory and an 80GB data drive. (DDR400 memory is too expensive, I'll upgrade to 512MB memory at some point when funds allow). I intend to use my current 18GB drive as a system drive (and non video data). I intend to install Windows XP pro.
Now my proposal for making it a bit faster. The video software (Pinnacle studio 7) manual suggests defragging the disks and making sure the swap (page) file is contiguous. As the board supports Raid 0 and I have a couple of spare 3GB ish (I think they're UDMA66) hard drives lying around I thought I'd install them as a raid 0 striped pair and put my swap file on them and only my swap file on them so I don't get problems with the swap files becoming non contiguous.
Has anybody else done this?
Would I get much improvement in speed (the drives are slower)?
What software (preferably free or trial) should I use to benchmark my system before and after that would test for the sort of data transfer I'd be using in digital video editing?
If I wasn't going to use the old disks in raid would it be quicker to have the swap file on the data disk (with all my video footage) or on the system disk (with all the application files)?
How do I move the location of the swap file in windows XP Pro?
Hoping for a better solution
ChrisJ
