NTFS or not NTFS that is the....??

[MJA]

The BEST solution to this situation is to have THREE partitions.
1) Your O/S should be on a Fat32 partition (for safe recovery)
2) Your data files should be on NTFS (for all the reasons stated above)
3) Your SWAP FILE should be on a 2-gig FAT(16) partition (as this is the system with lowest overhead and, therefore, the fastest I/O time)

Sharing partitions on the same physical disks does kind of negate some of the benefits of this solution - but if you can get the FAT and NTFS partitions on one disk and the FAT32 on another you'll find you have a very fast, reliable disk sub-system.

Note: FAT has no intrinisc security built in - but for a swap file that's not important (and this is why it's quicker for this purpose!!)

Cheers

Big Dave

[Patrick]

That's a lotta swapping!

Dave, your suggestion of using FAT16 for the swap file is interesting, but why such a large partition? Two GBs!!???

[Flying dutchman]

IMHO, if you set your swap file to a fixed size, the file system used is pretty irrelevant (fat/fat32/ntfs) : Windows 2000 tries to allocate a non-fragmented block for the swap file anyway (all sectors nicely in a row) and has, as far as I know, no reason to subsequently access the file allocation table at all.

[MJA]

That's true (almost) - but there's still the inbuilt security considerations of the file system to consider. For NTFS and Fat32 the permissions will still be checked - even though they will always allow the system to access the swap file.
(You can actually lock the system out of it's own swap file if you want with NTFS!!!)

As for the 2GB swap file size - If it's a nice big partition then you'll never run out of space. The swap file itself will get created/deleted as needed - and has the potential to get very large if you're doing a lot of video manipulation. If you're leaving it up to windows then it's set to at least the size of your ram anyway - but it should really be twice that to remove the 'adjusting the size of virtual memory' messages.

[Flying dutchman]

The permissions stuff applies only to ntfs, not to fat32 (wouldn't be of use anyway under Fat32 since it's so easy to bypass the OS).

For normal use, a separate swap partition would indeed gain some speed. Especially if it's not on the OS's drive; it would minimize head movement thus saving valuable milliseconds.
But if you capture video, it shouldn't be put on the capture drive either for the same reason. So we're talking about three drives minimum. Using a dedicated _drive_ for the swap file would be ideal, but I wouldn't want to use one of those good-ole 2 GB leftovers that only support PIO mode!

I already have a cd writer, tape drive and two hard drives in my system, so no more IDE ports available. (even had to put my dvd-rom in the server). My Windows 2000 system is ACPI based (everything on one IRQ, even the Marvel, and it WORKS!) but I feel I would be pushing my luck too far if I inserted another IDE controller. If I ever buy another motherboard it'll need to be APIC based (which handles more than 16 IRQ's). And it'll definitely be Intel-based.

[MJA]

It doesn't HAVE to be like that!!!!!
You can get some really cool RAID boards (with the Promise controllers) for Athlons. I've got one and if you're not using the Promise controller for RAID then you can have EIGHT IDE devices attached to it - and no contention with IRQs

[MultimediaMan]

It's not a good idea to move the swap file off of the Boot Drive in NT.2K, XP: you lose valuable features regarding error checking, and the OS may "lose contact" with the Swap drive long enough to cause a problem.

With Win9x, it was a neat way to get a little speed; nowadays it's not much of an issue, and if you REALLY need the swap drive to be fast and the Operating system snappy, install and boot off of a RAID 0 Array. I did this sort of "by accident" and have never looked back (My motherboard enumerates the onboard Promise RAID controller as the first SCSI device, unless you turn off the feature in the BIOS - and of course, it was enabled by default.)

I was amazed at the speed of the operating system (WinXP-SP1)when I did this - on top of that, installation only took 37 minutes - including disk formatting time (40GB RAID0 disk - 2 x 20GB HDDs).

Running Multiple RAID adapters is kosher, too. (Where I work, our big HP webservers do just that: they run off of a mirrored RAID0 array and run the web apps on a RAID5 array) Strange, but their uptime is like 99.9997%.

[Debbie]

It has been almost a week since I went NTFS.
I reinstalld the OS + software a cople of times from image CD's and had no problems. Almost no frame drop during capture and the machine is absolutly stable.
All in all is it realy worth having FAT32,FAT16 and NTFS jumbled up in a computer, will there be a real significant gain to justify the confusion?

Debbie

[tabdelgawad]

There's no question that NTFS is more reliable (and efficient) than either of the FAT systems. I doubt there's any (noticeable) performance penalty associated with using it (given that FAT is older and less sophisticated, there might be a performance penalty the other way, for all I know).

The only reasonable argument I saw for using FAT32 over NTFS is that it *is* much easier to access FAT32 partitions if you hose your OS install. There are, of course, tools for accessing NTFS partitions from a boot floppy, but I think the best solution is to use separate partitions for the OS and Programs on the one hand, and Data on the other. I don't even bother to back up my OS/programs (C) partition because I know I can format C and reinstall everything, but I'm religious about not letting any data I care about reside on C and about backing up my data periodically. Having dealt with corrupted partitions and broken hardrives several times, I can't overemphasize how much this arrangement has saved my behind. Of course, this is a good arrangement regardless of your file system choice.

As for video capture, I've found that on my system (RRG with G200 on K6-2 550, UDMA 33 7200 RPM drives) the bottleneck is definitely the sustained drive writes (something like 2-3 Megs/sec with MJpeg compression). At a minimum, a defrag of the empty space I'm writing to is necessary to avoid dropped frames. At best, I would prefer to have a separate partition/drive for video capture files so I can defrag/format it at will.

My guess is if you have a newer Athlon or P4 system with ATA100 drives, you're not going to be dropping any frames regardless of your file system or partition arrangement

HTH

Tamer

[Flying dutchman]

@MJA:
I'm using Windows 2000 with a Marvel G-200. The hardware is a Celeron-900 on an Asus CUSL2-C (i815) board, with the drives using UDMA-33 (can't use UDMA-100 because of the disk caddies; UDMA-100 caddies are expensive!) and I can capture full-frame HuffYuv @ 10 Mbps and full-frame MJPG for hours and hours without a single frame drop. PCI bandwidth is "endless" on this board, and I haven't met an incompatibility so far though the computer is crammed full with stuff such as a tape drive, firewire, lan etc.

Using RAID is tempting but I won't go the AMD way; I have only bad experiences with non-Intel chipsets, which includes VIA and SIS.

I think I'll get me a decent Intel P4 board by the end of next year, ideally one with the IDE (raid?) controller not attached to the southbridge in order to get even more PCI bandwidth. If I can't get one of those, I'll buy a dedicated raid controller instead. Whatever the outcome, the Marvel G200 will be unusable in the new board so I'll have to get a new capturing device. Maybe I'll build a dedicated capturing machine from the Marvel.

[MJA]

@Flying Dutchman:

I'm currently using a Gigabyte GA7DXR board with an Athlon XP 1500+ . I don't use the RAID functions as RAID - I use them as an additional IDE controller. The 761 chiset has been, for me at least, totally rock solid

I have only EVER had one BSOD and that was the fault of an old 3D Power GForce 2MX card and Windows ME. I've had Windows 2000 and now Win XP running flawlessly for a year now. I've even done lots of experimenting with different disk configurations 'on the fly' with absolutely no ill effects.

I guess your distrust of AMD is more or less on par with my opinions on the price of Intel processors, so I know I won'tr persuade you to convert - but it's worth giving the newer AMD chipsets a look before you upgrade, especially VIA's KT-400 and the (dare I say it) n-Force 2

Whatever you decide - you can get motherboards for Intel processors that have on-board Promise controllers for those additional IDe devices - they might be worth a look?

[Technoid]

Originally posted by MJA
@Flying Dutchman:

I'm currently using a Gigabyte GA7DXR board with an Athlon XP 1500+ . I don't use the RAID functions as RAID - I use them as an additional IDE controller. The 761 chiset has been, for me at least, totally rock solid

I have only EVER had one BSOD and that was the fault of an old 3D Power GForce 2MX card and Windows ME. I've had Windows 2000 and now Win XP running flawlessly for a year now. I've even done lots of experimenting with different disk configurations 'on the fly' with absolutely no ill effects.

I guess your distrust of AMD is more or less on par with my opinions on the price of Intel processors, so I know I won'tr persuade you to convert - but it's worth giving the newer AMD chipsets a look before you upgrade, especially VIA's KT-400 and the (dare I say it) n-Force 2

Whatever you decide - you can get motherboards for Intel processors that have on-board Promise controllers for those additional IDe devices - they might be worth a look?

I woulden't recomend anyone that is interested in vidcap to get a VIA board

The SIS 745 is marvelous (excuse the pun )

Nforce

Intel: Give us your wallet™

[Brian Ellis]

I use Intel for all my computers because there are some apps that are designed specifically for them and either will not run or will run badly on Athlon, some of them giving zero support for problems on non-Intel hardware. I've 2 or 3 such softwares (fairky specialised scientific apps) bur compatibility is a must for me. Some of the PhotoShop versions is a case in point: Adobe will not support them on non-Intel (not the latest versions, though), but it is the most popular one I know with this caveat.

Remember, software developers usually work on Intel machines and testing on non-Intel is almost an afterthought.

[Flying dutchman]

I don't know about other countries, but in Holland and Germany there's hardly any price differenc between AMD and Intel CPU's in the 1800-2400 MHz range, so that's not an issue. For about $200-250 you get perfectly comparable speed.

BTW, there was a negative review in the previous CT magazine of the Via KT-400 chipset. In fact they recommended that Via quickly remove all references to anything that sounded like "400". They said the only reason to buy a KT400 board would be that Bios support might be along a little longer than for the KT-3xx series...