I have a 180GIG SATA drive as a main drive I will be using as a main drive
for A/V editing.
Based on some of the things I've read in this group, it's not recommended to
partition because I will wear the drive down if I'm reading and writing with
a partition between them. Experienced advice please...

In article e6tac.2122$zh.430@fed1read07, Smith wrote:


I have a 180GIG SATA drive as a main drive I will be using as a main drive
for A/V editing.
Based on some of the things I've read in this group, it's not recommended to
partition because I will wear the drive down if I'm reading and writing with
a partition between them.

There's a fallacy in there, or at least a misunderstanding about how the
drives work. A contiguous logical space on an ATA (or SCSI) disk drive
is not likely to be a contiguous physical space anyway.

But that's not the point. I doubt you're going to have an ATA disk
drive long enough to worry about the stepper motor wearing out.

I would advise a small system partition. 8GB I guess, is small for XP.
Next, another small partition with big cluster sizes. Big clusters
reduce number of writes for the same data. Another 8GB in precisely
the same number of clusters for a backup of this one.

Leave the rest of the space unallocated ;-)

Oops, you said A/V, not just audio. The same principles apply, but
obviously you need way more space. So make that 8 gigs for system,
64 GB for data, another 64 for a backup of that data (preferably on
another drive!)

I'd like to know where you got the understanding that the partition
table has any effect on wear and tear of the drive. That might be based
on some reasonable assumption, but it's not something to worry about.

I tend to think in terms of "local storage" and "archival storage".

For local storage, I really don't want to deal with a partition larger
than I can comfortably backup. Right now, that's 8GB. So the first
thing I do with a new disk is to partition it into 8GB chunks. Windows
goes on the first one. The rest are "extended" partitions, System
(NTFS), DataA(NTFS), DataB(NTFS), root(ext3), usr(ext3), var(ext3),
home(ext3)

(obviously I do a dual boot linux/windows setup).

Anyway, I leave the rest unallocated until I need it, which I never do,
thanks to the file server (RAID). I'd rather have a "small", *quiet*,
fast local disk.

However much RAM you have, quadruple it. On my Shuttle XPC (the machine
on my music rig), I can turn *off* the disk drive and the fan, and
record to RAM. (4GB). Yeah, that's risky in case of power failure, but
I like the quiet.

I don't know much about A/V editing, but I do know about disk drives.
I've worked in big datacenters and been responsible for acres of
machines with every kind of disk drive from MFM to fibre channel netapp
filers. It doesn't really make a difference how you use a disk drive,
what kind of data is on it, or how often it's accessed. Some of them
fail after a month in the rack, and some of them will work perfectly
5 years from now, and there's no correlation.

Keep your partitions small (== manageable). Use a nonmagnetic medium
(DVD+/-R?) for long term storage. Remember the maxim "the steady state
of disks is full", and don't try to fight it with bigger drives.

Some of the old school audio folks have commented about the loss of
discipline that came bundled with the unlimited number of tracks in a
DAW. Maybe keep that in mind?

Smith wrote:
I have a 180GIG SATA drive as a main drive I will be using as a main
drive for A/V editing.
Based on some of the things I've read in this group, it's not
recommended to partition because I will wear the drive down if I'm
reading and writing with a partition between them. Experienced
advice please...


If your plan is to partition it by putting your OS on one portion and you
A/V material on the other portion , no, that's not recommended. With hard
drives so cheap these days, buy a small one for your OS and keep this one
exclusively for you project material.

Mike

Smith wrote:

I have a 180GIG SATA drive as a main drive I will be using
as a main drive for A/V editing.

An AVputer should generally have at least 2 disks, 3 may be an
advantage, it is required to understand just what software will do what
how to be more exact. Windows comes with a "where do you want the
pagefile/swapfile option choice for a reason, OS and pagefile should
preferably be on separate physical drives.

Kind regards

Peter Larsen

--
*******************************************
* My site is at: http://www.muyiovatki.dk *
*******************************************

Mike Kujbida wrote:

Smith wrote:
I have a 180GIG SATA drive as a main drive I will be using as a main
drive for A/V editing.
Based on some of the things I've read in this group, it's not
recommended to partition because I will wear the drive down if I'm
reading and writing with a partition between them. Experienced
advice please...

If your plan is to partition it by putting your OS on one portion and you
A/V material on the other portion , no, that's not recommended. With hard
drives so cheap these days, buy a small one for your OS and keep this one
exclusively for you project material.

No, get a 120 GB drive ... hmm, they _are_ getting small nowadays ....
hmm ... the space experience when I got that ST157 is not likely to be
repeated anytime soon ...

Mike


Kind regards

Peter Larsen


--
*******************************************
* My site is at: http://www.muyiovatki.dk *
*******************************************

I thought about doing that, but then that's a waste of physical storage
space inside the case, and it's cheaper per gigabyte when you buy a larger
drive.


"Mike Kujbida" wrote in message
...
Smith wrote:
I have a 180GIG SATA drive as a main drive I will be using as a main
drive for A/V editing.
Based on some of the things I've read in this group, it's not
recommended to partition because I will wear the drive down if I'm
reading and writing with a partition between them. Experienced
advice please...


If your plan is to partition it by putting your OS on one portion and you
A/V material on the other portion , no, that's not recommended. With hard
drives so cheap these days, buy a small one for your OS and keep this one
exclusively for you project material.

Mike

Smith wrote:

I thought about doing that, but then that's a waste of physical
storage space inside the case, and it's cheaper per gigabyte when you
buy a larger drive.

Things may not be what they seem.

First off, that 180 GB hard drive may seem huge, but there's nothing like a
few 10 GB projects (multitrack, 32 bit) to change your mind about that.

Secondly, there's often a big performance advantage associated with the use
of more than one spindle. Many of the canonical operations in audio
production net out to a sequential copy of a large amount of data from one
dataset to another dataset. It turns out that copying a file on a single
hard drive does a pretty good job of maximizing seek times.. If you haven't
noticed, the actual seek times of hard drives haven't changed that much in
the past 5 years. What's changed the most are density and sequential I/O
speeds.

In rough numbers, a copy of a large file to someplace else on the same hard
drive might toddle along at a few megabytes per second, while copying the
same file to a second drive might run 10 times faster. When you're working
with files in the 200 megabyte to 2 gigabyte territory, you start noticing
the difference that this makes.

Thirdly, the idea that larger drives are cheaper per gigabyte is false. Per
gigabyte costs decrease to a point and then they go back up. It's all about
marketing and process yields for high-density platters. I think that minimal
cost per gigabyte is someplace around 150 GB today, but its a moving target.

After building several generations of DAWs, I've found that the *right*
number of drives for the software I use is three. One for boot, OS, program
libraries, and semi-permanent storage of working data. The second for
temporary working files and archives. The third holds the swap file, and
more archives. YMMV.

Peter Larsen wrote:
An AVputer should generally have at least 2 disks, 3 may be an
advantage, it is required to understand just what software will do what
how to be more exact. Windows comes with a "where do you want the
pagefile/swapfile option choice for a reason, OS and pagefile should
preferably be on separate physical drives.

Then there is the school of thought (which I subscribe to) that
if you have reached the point where you care where you page file
is, then you don't have enough RAM and you need to stop thinking
about where to put your page file and start thinking about how
to get more RAM.

Especially these days when RAM is so (comparatively) cheap.

However, I do agree that it can be nice to have two drives when
streaming stuff from one file to another file. If the files
are on separate disks, it will go muuuuch faster.

- Logan

I have read this discussion and as someone who is about to buy a new system
I would like some more advice.
I will be using the system for two main purposes:
1) Basic small business uses (website maintainence[actinic], CRM[goldmine],
accounts[sage] etc.)
2) Editing sports coaching videos propably using vegas+dvd

I was going to get two drives, a 40Gb drive and a 120Gb drive.
The plan was to use the 40Gb for the OS and business software/files and the
120Gb drive for vegas and the video projects.
Is this the right way to go? or should vegas go on the same drive as the os?
should I partition the 120Gb drive for storage of business files and video
projects leaving the 40Gb drive just for os and software?
do you recommend partitioning the 40Gb drive for os / software / storage?
Should I bite the bullet and get another drive?

any advice very welcome
Ian

Ian Warren wrote:
I have read this discussion and as someone who is about to buy a new
system I would like some more advice.
I will be using the system for two main purposes:
1) Basic small business uses (website maintainence[actinic],
CRM[goldmine], accounts[sage] etc.)
2) Editing sports coaching videos propably using vegas+dvd

I was going to get two drives, a 40Gb drive and a 120Gb drive.
The plan was to use the 40Gb for the OS and business software/files
and the 120Gb drive for vegas and the video projects.
Is this the right way to go? or should vegas go on the same drive as
the os? should I partition the 120Gb drive for storage of business
files and video projects leaving the 40Gb drive just for os and
software?
do you recommend partitioning the 40Gb drive for os / software /
storage? Should I bite the bullet and get another drive?

any advice very welcome
Ian


Do as has been suggested in this thread and get a larger drive for your OS.
Partition that for all your applications (dr. C) and business files (dr. D).
Leave the large drive (dr. E) exclusively for video projects. If you're
serious about video work, get a 3rd one (dr. F) as well. Use E for
capturing and F for the finished work. Things will go much faster during
editing. It will also make backups of critical work much easier.

Mike

"Mike Kujbida" wrote
If your plan is to partition it by putting your OS on one portion and
you
A/V material on the other portion , no, that's not recommended. With
hard
drives so cheap these days, buy a small one for your OS and keep this
one
exclusively for you project material.

"Smith" wrote
I thought about doing that, but then that's a waste of physical storage
space inside the case, and it's cheaper per gigabyte when you buy a larger
drive.

You definately need your OS and AV data to be on different partitions. This
makes housekeeping much easier. If they are on different physical drives
then your OS won't slow down your AV drive when it needs to use the swapfile
or load a plugin or something.

I would use two drives with the first partitioned for a small OS partition
and the rest of the drive for assorted general stuff. Then the largest
fastest drive available exclusively for AV data.

Anthony Gosnell

In article e6tac.2122$zh.430@fed1read07,
says...
I have a 180GIG SATA drive as a main drive I will be using as a main drive
for A/V editing.
Based on some of the things I've read in this group, it's not recommended to
partition because I will wear the drive down if I'm reading and writing with
a partition between them. Experienced advice please...



No it is not good to do that, for a fast system, you
need a seperate drive for each partition you were
thinking about creating.

Partitions can only be written to one at a time,
seperate drive can write at the same time.

If you were in rush hour, and came to a toll booth
that had 2 gates, would you rather the 2 gates be on a
single lane one after the next, or on a double lane
side by side?

On Wed, 31 Mar 2004 12:27:44 +0100, "Ian Warren"
wrote:

I was going to get two drives, a 40Gb drive and a 120Gb drive.
The plan was to use the 40Gb for the OS and business software/files and the
120Gb drive for vegas and the video projects.
Is this the right way to go? or should vegas go on the same drive as the os?
should I partition the 120Gb drive for storage of business files and video
projects leaving the 40Gb drive just for os and software?
do you recommend partitioning the 40Gb drive for os / software / storage?
Should I bite the bullet and get another drive?

There's no point in separating any program from Windows. They are
intimately intertwined.

The 40 GB drive is over-ample for Windows and programs. You might as
well use the extra space for storage. Whether this is on a separate
partition or merely in a separate folder is immaterial.

In article ,
Logan Shaw wrote:

Especially these days when RAM is so (comparatively) cheap.

Put 4GB on your DAW. You will not regret it. Nothing helps performance
more than RAM. Use DDR400, not cheap RAM.

hi -- something else to think about is the day that your hdd fails.
this happened to me, but luckily i had a 2nd drive for my audio data,
so none of that d: drive data was lost. it might cost $30 more for
two drives vs. one, but the insurance is worth it.

(a 2nd partition will afford some security as well, but not as much as
a 2nd physical drive)

all the best,
chris deckard in saint louis moe





"Smith" wrote in message news:e6tac.2122$zh.430@fed1read07...
I have a 180GIG SATA drive as a main drive I will be using as a main drive
for A/V editing.
Based on some of the things I've read in this group, it's not recommended to
partition because I will wear the drive down if I'm reading and writing with
a partition between them. Experienced advice please...

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, "Smith" wrote:
I have a 180GIG SATA drive as a main drive I will be using as a main drive
for A/V editing.
Based on some of the things I've read in this group, it's not recommended to
partition because I will wear the drive down if I'm reading and writing with
a partition between them. Experienced advice please...

What works for ME is to have a small(er) C drive for ALL SOFTWARE, and
a large D drive for ONLY VIDEO FILES

In my case, that is 20gig C and 100gig D

Please each drive as the Primary on an IDE ribbon cable (then for the
Secondary on either IDE channel you may have Zip or DVD or whatever)

The idea is that any one drive has one set of read/write heads

If you partition a drive that one set of read/write heads is BUSY

With separate drives for software and video files the software drive
read/write heads are free to work without interrupting the video flow

Every time Winddoze needs to update the swap file, or read a program
segment into memory, or "whatever" that one set of read/write heads on
the software drive may do so... without getting in the way of the
OTHER set of read/write heads on the video drive doing video work


John Thomas Smith
http://www.direct2usales.com
http://www.pacifier.com/~jtsmith

On Wed, 31 Mar 2004 06:49:08 -0500, "Mike Kujbida"
wrote:

It will also make backups of critical work much easier.

This is an important area that many people don't consider. You can
set up a simple automated backup system for under $200 with an
external HD and True Image 7 that will protect your critical data from
disk crashes. If you use an imaging program for backups, you don't
want a lot of unimportant stuff mixed with the parts you care about.

I have 4 separate partitions: OS/Apps, games, created data (photos,
docs, spreadsheets, etc), and archives (that are also dumped to DVD
intermittently). I image the OS and data partitions daily and ignore
the games and archive partitions. This way I can recover easily from
a disk crash without losing anything major.

Most people wait until after a disk crash to plan a backup system.


Neil Maxwell - I don't speak for my employer

In article ,
says...
Smith wrote:

I thought about doing that, but then that's a waste of physical
storage space inside the case, and it's cheaper per gigabyte when you
buy a larger drive.
(snip)
Thirdly, the idea that larger drives are cheaper per gigabyte is false. Per
gigabyte costs decrease to a point and then they go back up. It's all about
marketing and process yields for high-density platters. I think that minimal
cost per gigabyte is someplace around 150 GB today, but its a moving target.


Agreed, just a quick list (excluding sale prices, or
really uncommonly low prices) from www.pricescan.com.
Of course, all of these numbers are probably only
accurate to within 5% or so (variations in how drive
makers measure capacity combined with pricing
fluctuations).

IDE:
080Gb $074 $0.92/Gb
120Gb $095 $0.79/Gb
160Gb $094 $0.59/Gb
200Gb $132 $0.66/Gb
250Gb $190 $0.76/Gb
300Gb $250 $0.83/Gb

SATA:
080Gb $078 $0.98/Gb
120Gb $096 $0.80/Gb
160Gb $120 $0.75/Gb
200Gb $145 $0.72/Gb
250Gb $200 $0.80/Gb
300Gb n/a (anyone make these yet?)

IDE (PATA) has gotten really cheap recently... and SATA
still seems to have a slight price premium.

On Wed, 31 Mar 2004 09:09:25 -0800, John Thomas Smith
wrote:

Every time Winddoze needs to update the swap file, or read a program
segment into memory, or "whatever" that one set of read/write heads on
the software drive may do so... without getting in the way of the
OTHER set of read/write heads on the video drive doing video work

It's getting harder and harder to actually define that "whatever" :-)

For office, programming, website design: No. There's no point in making
things complicated. Just store everything in My Documents and back that up
daily.

It is convenient to have a separate partition for OS and programs (no "user"
data) because you can re-install the system without losing documents.

If you plan to use audio/video recording and editing, a partition for your
audio projects may enhance performance. Why?
- Because you can set up this partition with large (or huge - NTFS allows
cluster sizes up to half a megabyte!) clusters. This will reduce the
overhead, since there is very litte administration to be performed when
reading/writing files.
- Fragmentation. Work on your project and when it is done, just wipe the
whole drive. Fragmentation is zero.

Please forgive my ignorance, but can you elaborate on the benefits of the
"swap file" and how to configure it for optimal use of your PC. I have two
PCs running Win98Se and WinXP Home Edition. Thanks.


"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
Smith wrote:

I thought about doing that, but then that's a waste of physical
storage space inside the case, and it's cheaper per gigabyte when you
buy a larger drive.

Things may not be what they seem.

First off, that 180 GB hard drive may seem huge, but there's nothing like
a
few 10 GB projects (multitrack, 32 bit) to change your mind about that.

Secondly, there's often a big performance advantage associated with the
use
of more than one spindle. Many of the canonical operations in audio
production net out to a sequential copy of a large amount of data from one
dataset to another dataset. It turns out that copying a file on a single
hard drive does a pretty good job of maximizing seek times.. If you
haven't
noticed, the actual seek times of hard drives haven't changed that much in
the past 5 years. What's changed the most are density and sequential I/O
speeds.

In rough numbers, a copy of a large file to someplace else on the same
hard
drive might toddle along at a few megabytes per second, while copying the
same file to a second drive might run 10 times faster. When you're working
with files in the 200 megabyte to 2 gigabyte territory, you start noticing
the difference that this makes.

Thirdly, the idea that larger drives are cheaper per gigabyte is false.
Per
gigabyte costs decrease to a point and then they go back up. It's all
about
marketing and process yields for high-density platters. I think that
minimal
cost per gigabyte is someplace around 150 GB today, but its a moving
target.

After building several generations of DAWs, I've found that the *right*
number of drives for the software I use is three. One for boot, OS,
program
libraries, and semi-permanent storage of working data. The second for
temporary working files and archives. The third holds the swap file, and
more archives. YMMV.

"anthony.gosnell" wrote ...
You definately need your OS and AV data to be on different partitions.

And many of us believe that they should be on separate drives,
not just separate partitions on the same spindle.

"Ian Warren" wrote
I will be using the system for two main purposes:
1) Basic small business uses (website maintainence[actinic],
CRM[goldmine],
accounts[sage] etc.)
2) Editing sports coaching videos propably using vegas+dvd

I was going to get two drives, a 40Gb drive and a 120Gb drive.
The plan was to use the 40Gb for the OS and business software/files and
the
120Gb drive for vegas and the video projects.
Is this the right way to go? or should vegas go on the same drive as the
os?
should I partition the 120Gb drive for storage of business files and video
projects leaving the 40Gb drive just for os and software?
do you recommend partitioning the 40Gb drive for os / software / storage?
Should I bite the bullet and get another drive?

I would partition your smaller drive so that you have a relatively small OS
partition which can be backed up and reinstalled easily and which is
relatively clutter free so that housekeeping is easy.
Vegas and all your other software shpuld be stored on the same partition as
your OS.
The second partition you should use for your website and accounts data etc.
The bigger drive should be used for video files only.

My question is why are you planning on getting a 40Gb drive? If you are
buying a new drive it is wise to get the lowest cost per Gb as you will
always find you need more space, especially if you are doing video. You are
also limited by how many drives you can install into a computer so it is a
good idea to make them large.

Don't get a third drive until you need it. By that time you will probably
get 50% extra space for the same money.

Anthony Gosnell

Smith wrote:
Please forgive my ignorance, but can you elaborate on the benefits of
the "swap file" and how to configure it for optimal use of your PC.
I have two PCs running Win98Se and WinXP Home Edition. Thanks.

The benefit of the swap file is that it allows your computer to run more
programs than it has the RAM to hold. However, this feature can add
tremendous delays to the operation of your machine when it is used, because
your swap file is literally 1000's of times slower than your computer's RAM.

You can speed the response of the swap file by putting it on a hard drive
that does not otherwise get a lot of activity.

For example, a simple system has one hard drive with everything on it. A
common upgrade involves adding a second hard drive to get some more space.
If you reconfigure your machine to place the swap file on the second hard
drive, you might get a better balance of I/O activity between the two
drives, and have improved performance of the computer.

For win98, see http://www.putergeek.com/virtual_memory/ under "To specify a
different hard disk".

For XP see http://yahoo.pcworld.com/yahoo/artic...,112039,00.asp under
"Relocate your virtual memory"

Well, any drive has to have at least one partition on it.

--
-----------

Roger W. Norman
SirMusic Studio

I agree with:

- it doesn't hurt to have the OS on a separate disk.
- it's good to have as much memory as possible

I also beleive firmly in using RAID 0 if you are doing work that does
heavy I/O such as digital audio.

I also perform a bunch of tweaks:

1) Use 64K cluster size on the work drive(s): format [drive]: /z:64
2) Turn off disk performance satistics: diskperf –n
3) Disable Paging Executive:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session
Manager/Memory Management/ DisablePagingExecutive = 1
4) Disable Disc Indexing Service
5) Set Virtual Memory to a fixed size
5) Use more RAM than virtual memory: Add the following line to the
system.ini file:
[386 Enh]
ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1

I do other tweaks but these seem to help.

Mike Cressey
Singer/songwriter - DAW Builder - http://www.MusicIsLove.com

Laurence Payne wrote:

There's no point in separating any program from Windows.
They are intimately intertwined.

It is in fact preferable to have the applications on another spindle for
that very reason, it allows faster loading/access of multiple .dll's.


Kind regards

Peter Larsen


--
*******************************************
* My site is at: http://www.muyiovatki.dk *
*******************************************

On Sat, 03 Apr 2004 22:27:57 +0200, Peter Larsen
wrote:


There's no point in separating any program from Windows.
They are intimately intertwined.

It is in fact preferable to have the applications on another spindle for
that very reason, it allows faster loading/access of multiple .dll's.

Continually? Or once, when loading a program? To save how many
milliseconds?

CubaseFAQ www.laurencepayne.co.uk/CubaseFAQ.htm
"Possibly the world's least impressive web site": George Perfect