Re: Two hard drives or two Partitions...which

[Laurence Payne]

>Any suggetions as to how much faster two drives are over two partitions?

At doing what?

[Arny Krueger]

"Mike Rivers" > wrote in message
news:znr1056796485k@trad...

> In article >
writes:

> > Any suggestions as to how much faster two drives are over two
partitions?

YMMV. Anywhere from none at all to LOTS!

> With today's drives and computers, I'd guess that the difference would
> be insignificant unless you had an application that was constantly
> reading small chunks from one drive and writing them to another.

It's so darn easy to find yourself in this posture without even trying.

Every application has a *hidden* data file called the swap file. If you want
a real thrill, take a RAM-constrained system and put the swap file on a
drive all by itself. Adding RAM is often a cheaper solution, but its not
always a better one.

The point is that with swapping, the possibility of a program demanding
service from two vastly displaced areas on the hard drive is very high, at
least part of the time.

> It used to be good practice, and probably still is, to put
> applications on one drive and audio on another, but that's as much for
> safety as for operating speed. Today there might be an advantage in a
> system that's pushed to the edge, but if you have to ask, you should
> try.

One app that responds very well to 2-drive operation is Cool Edit. For even
more fun, try 3 drives. You get less bang out of the third drive than the
second, but when it kicks in, you generally know it.

With the ready availability of high performance hard drive controller cards
at low prices (The generics with Silicon Image chips being a case in point)
makes having lotsa hard drives very feasible, as do UDMA CDROMs and burners.

I'm currently building a few machines in a mid-tower case that has something
like 8 3.5 inch slots. The good news is that there is space for lotsa fans.
Probably not the machine of choice for tracking, but as a data sink, it
could be grand.

[David Antony Clark]

If it is of any help, I have found the following to work best for me
in a small busy studio where down-time is a disatster.

Drive 1 partition 1 = System (6 gig)
Drive 1 partition 2 = Data (Sonar) Loops + SFX (34 gig)

Drive 2 partition 1 = Audio only (30 gig)
Drive 2 partition 2 = Ghosts of Systems + Copy of SFX (10gig)

Drive 3 partition 1 = Duplicate of System. Installed not Ghosted
(6gig)
Drive 3 partition 2 = Sonar bundle files (34gig)

Drives 1 & 3 are Caddies.


Cheers
D

Laurence Payne > wrote in message >...
> >Any suggetions as to how much faster two drives are over two partitions?
>
> At doing what?

[Brian Takei]

Arny Krueger ) wrote:
> Adding RAM is often a cheaper solution, but its not
> always a better one.


When is it not, and how often? (not counting systems in which
'Committed Bytes' never approaches total RAM)


Regards,
- Brian

[William Sommerwerck]

If you're trying to run many applications at once, you need not only a lot of
RAM, but a large swapfile.

For reasons too complex to go into here, you need a swapfile at least twice as
large as the system RAM. If not, you can run into situations where the machine
slows down -- even though there's enough RAM for the loaded programs.

If you don't have a large-enough swapfile, you need either to enlarge it, or get
a larger hard drive, or add another drive. Most versions of Windows let the user
override the OS and select the size and location of the swapfile.


>> Adding RAM is often a cheaper solution, but its not
>> always a better one.

> When is it not, and how often? (not counting systems in
> which 'Committed Bytes' never approaches total RAM)