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update on DAW PC questions (long)
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So my first few questions a 1) Is my plan reasonable? It can work. 2) How shall I partition the DAW and general use OS? I have 50G to split between them (10G being used for WinSE). 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? Nothing but the obvious. My next questions maybe somewhat controversial. What are your views on Firwire vs. USB2.0? They both work swimmingly. I know Firewire is faster in reality, but I believe they are both fast enough for the number of audio channels I want. My main concern is longevity. From my understanding Firewire is the pro-video standard, so I can see how it may become the pro-audio standard as well. However, USB 2.0 has Intel behind it, so ALL the mobo's out there will have it. It'll be around a long, long time. Only time will tell for sure. 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. For background, this is a single user home computer. I have no need for encryption or security. Stability is nice (but does this come from WinXP or NTFS?) but speed is paramount for DAW from what I gather. So speed is my main concern. Do you agree? Hard drives are now fast enough that speed isn't a serious problem in virtually every case. A defragged FAT32 or NTFS drive is far faster than a fragged one. The file systems have different performance profiles - each does some things a little better. NTFS is more practical to use on large hard drives, and these days every new drive is a relatively large drive. People have complained that NTFS is slower than Fat32. Depends what you are doing. However, this may be due to the 512 byte partition WinXP uses by default. 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. The conversion program IME works well, so I don't know about this "garbage" thing. On the other hand, I still hear people say that Fat32 is faster for 'smaller' HD's and NTFS for larger HD's. Is this still true even with the 4k NTFS partitions? What is 'smaller'? Since WinXP won't format +32G in Fat32, many people use this as the limit for 'small'. I've got machines with both kinds of partitions in them. Frankly I don't notice much over-all difference in performance for audio. I do notice the fact that if XP stops without a proper shutdown, the restart is delayed because of the FAT drive. However, I also saw 12G somewhere. Anybody have any comments on this topic? Just use NTFS and enjoy, providing you don't want to access the data with your Win98 system. I kept some FAT drives on my dual-boot system for just that reason. I was going to have my 120G partitioned into several logical disks. One (or more) for DAW and the rest for general use. Any suggestions? I'm generally against partitioning. I tend to work in terms of whole drives. How much would I need for the DAW data? Is having the data on a separate HD from the OS a good idea? Let's put it this way. My favorite audio application is Cool Edit (AKA Adobe Audition). It is much faster when two drives are available. This is because a lot of what it does amounts to be sequential file copying. Sequential file copying is generally much faster between two drives than on just one. I thought manually controlling the paging file (using equal min and max settings) was no longer necessary in WinXP. Is this a holdover from the 'good ol' days' or is this still recommended? I find that permanent swap files are a good thing. Right now I allocate a 1 GB permanent swap file with 1 GB dynamic overflow. Having the swap file in a sweet spot on the boot drive (or other drive as appropriate) seems to be a good thing. A non-fragmented swap file still seems to be a good thing. In NTFS (assuming I go this way), is it still a good idea to have a separate partition just for the paging file to minimize fragmentation? If so, how much space did you reserve? In Win98SE I have 500M and every once in a while it is not enough. You don't need a separate partition, just a little planning. Turning off ACPI worries me a little. I have never messed with this before. Is this still recommended practice or is this still a myth from 'the good ol' days'? I have an ACPI compliant mobo that I got about 1 year ago. According to http://www.musicxp.net/installing_tips.htm configuring the installation as "standard" may actually reduce performance on an ACPI mobo. Maybe I don't care since I'm not going with a PCI audio interface. Any comments? I haven't found ACPI to be a problem lately. 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? I use standard MS defrag. 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? No problems with it on. Last Question (for now), what was the problem with the VIA chipset? It wasn't as Intel compatible as we would have liked. Is it still a problem with modern systems? The latest VIA chipset systems seem to be a whole lot more compatible. |
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