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wrote:

So my first few questions a
1) Is my plan reasonable?
2) How shall I partition the DAW and general use OS? I have 50G to split
between them (10G being used for WinSE).

I have the DAW which is Adobe Audition aka CoolEdit Pro in the same partitions
as the operating systems. However the data files and the temporary files are
on different partitions. The layout of my disks look like

Disk 1 partition 1 has Win XP and all programs needed with that os. NTFS.
Disk 1 partition 2 hold programs which are loosley coupled to the
os such as OpenOffice. Swap file for Win 98.
Old music projects. FAT-32
Disk 1 partition 3 has the temporary files for the DAW. FAT-32

Disk 2 partition 1 has Windows 98 SE and another set of associated programs
including the DAW. The current CD images are stored here
too (Feurio projects). Swap file for Windows XP. FAT-32
Disk 2 partition 2 and more partitions have the permanent files containing
current projects. NTFS.

3) Splitting the DAW and general use OS's into two separate boot partitions
is a good idea, right? This lets me customize the
settings for each of the usages independently of the other.
Are there any issues having two WinXP partitions?

That depends on the softwa If the software makes heavy use of the Windows
registry and the common files folder in program files I keep the software with
the os, otherwise I have the software in a different partition (OpenOffice in
my case). DAW makes heavy use of temporary files and these should be kept on a
different drive. This is a performance issue, see below.

My next questions maybe somewhat controversial. What are your views on
Firwire vs. USB2.0? I know Firewire is faster in reality,

I cannot comment much upon this issue.

My next questions all deal with Fat32 vs. NTFS. I know there has been alot of
info and banter about this, and I've read a lot of
those. I don't want to start a flame war. I just want some updated information
to help weed through the mis-information out there.

If the CPU is fast enough there shouldn't be much difference is speed
between FAT-32 and NTFS for sequential file acces (DAW work). At least,
I haven't found any on different computers.

The main difference I found is that defragmenting a partition is better
done with defrag that comes with Windows 98. The defrag built into Windows
XP does a poor job in defragmenting free space on a NTFS volume. So I
keep the temporary files on a FAT-32 volume which is defragged by running
Win 98.

Why do I use NTFS at all? It is faster in recovery from a crash and I hope
it does a better job in case of troubles: I had never experienced cross
allocated file space in NTFS.

From my understanding, if you change this to 4k partitions, then the Fat32
advantage largely goes away. Is this true? I will be
formatting a new HD, so none of that 'convert FAT32 to NTFS' garbage for me.

I use 32 kB blocks for those partitions that store large files, regardless
of NTFS or FAT-32. To me NTFS seems to be a bit faster in reading or writing
large files. 96 kHz sampling rate and 32 bit per sample do result in large
files...

The defrag that comes with WinXP does *not* defrag the MTF in NTFS
(some consider this key in maintaining hi-speed performance for
NTFS). Third-party defrag programs do. Do you use them?
Which do you recommend?

See above.

Some say to definitely turn the Task Scheduler service off.
Others say that the pre-fetching operation inherent in the Task
Scheduler warrants leaving it on. What is the current thought on this?

It's turned off on all my computers as is the find file program
(indexer) and the recycler.

Last Question (for now), what was the problem with the VIA chipset?

There had been several issues. Those I suffered from with the 686
south bridge:

* Only one disk could be active at any time. Having three drivers
dramatically reduced the throughput on all disks when all disks
were active.
* My CD burner (master device on secondary IDE) quit burning when
the slave device (disk) on the secondary IDE was accessed. A IDE
bus reset occured.

Is it still a problem with modern systems?

VIA has made its home work. OTOH I move that CD burner to a different
computer which has an Intel chip set. And as the motherboard failed
I replaced it with a more modern one VIA-333 chipset series and a
diffent CD burner and those problems are gone.

Norbert

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