Ide, Sata Setup

[lenl1]

I am running an Asrock K7S8XE+ MB w/sis chipset, has been pretty solid so far. I had originally installed 2 Seagate 80 Gig SATA drives on it and set them up as Raid 0. I have read it is best to have a main drive for the OS and a second for capture files. I aquired an 80 gig Maxtor from work, IDE ATA 133, and I am wondering what is the best way to set it up? 80 Gig Maxtor main OS, and keep the 2 segates as raid 0 for capture files? Or split them all up?

Thank you

Lenl1

Asrock K7S8XE+ MB
Sounblaster sound card ( Temp)
Front side bus – 2x 200 (400 MHz data rate)
Memory bus speed – 2x 200 MHz (400MHz data rate)
AMD Athlon XP 3200+,
512 MB DDR-SDRAM
ASUS Radeon 9600XT
SIS Raid 0 (2 Seagate 80 gig)
IO Magic DVD +- R / +- RW 4X
ADS Pyro Firewire card
Compro Ultra TV card
Windows XP Pro. ( sp1)

[KRSESQ]

Definitely set up the new drive as your OS drive and use the RAID exclusively for capture.

Kevin

[Brian Ellis]

Agreed! However, with W2k, I suggest that you partition the new drive into C: 10 Gb for the OS and utilities, D: 1 Gb exclusively for swap file, E: 10 Gb (or so) for applications and F: 59 Gb for video temp files and storing short clips, such as logos. With Win XP, the separate partition for swap files doesn't seem to matter as much.

[wkulecz]

I fail to see how having seperate partitions on a single spindle helps, and may in fact make things worse by forcing longer head seeks to skip over the empty space in the partitions.

For W2K I've never bothered doing anything but leave swap on the system drive and let windows dynamically manage it. If you are hitting swap for anything other than when switching between multiple open applications you need more RAM.

A third spindle set (fourth drive in his case) for video temp and preview files might make a noticable difference, but I'd not bet on it unless you are doing HDV or really complicated multi-track overlays.

--wally.

[Dr Mordrid]

I put my temps and preview files on the video drive (usually the RAID).

Dr. Mordrid

[lenl1]

Thank you for your responses, I am and will continue using XP as it has been behaving fairly well. I thought the OS on the new drive (80 gig Maxtor)would be the right thing but wasnt to sure if leaving the 2 seagates in raid 0 was the way to go or if I had to separate them. Right now I am using Pinnacle Studio 9.3 and it has been behaving also. In the beginning I had a heck of a time with it and all of a sudden it came around and no problem since then. I would like to get into the better stuff ie Mediastudio, Premier Pro, but budget wont support it yet! Have to take the wife on a winter getaway its been pretty cold here -35 to -40 C . Im still just getting into it but really enjoy it.

Thank you
Lenl1

Asrock K7S8XE+ MB
Sounblaster sound card ( Temp)
Front side bus – 2x 200 (400 MHz data rate)
Memory bus speed – 2x 200 MHz (400MHz data rate)
AMD Athlon XP 3200+,
512 MB DDR-SDRAM
ASUS Radeon 9600XT
SIS Raid 0 (2 Seagate 80 gig)
IO Magic DVD +- R / +- RW 4X
ADS Pyro Firewire card
Compro Ultra TV card
Windows XP Pro. ( sp1)
Sony - DCR-TRV720

[Brian Ellis]

Originally posted by wkulecz
I fail to see how having seperate partitions on a single spindle helps, and may in fact make things worse by forcing longer head seeks to skip over the empty space in the partitions.

For W2K I've never bothered doing anything but leave swap on the system drive and let windows dynamically manage it. If you are hitting swap for anything other than when switching between multiple open applications you need more RAM.

A third spindle set (fourth drive in his case) for video temp and preview files might make a noticable difference, but I'd not bet on it unless you are doing HDV or really complicated multi-track overlays.

--wally.

I agree a fourth drive would be ideal. The reason for the partitioning, especially for the swap file, is that the latter becomes too fragmented and slows down the whole caboodle. As for memory, I have 1 Gb, most of which is available at the start of a session, but the swap file does come into play during some rendering operations (undetermined). It may be that it happens when a file that is being generated is too big for the buffers to handle, but this is just a surmise.

Been there, done that!

[landrover]

Does RAID-0 still have an advantage over a single drive or are modern-day drives fast enough?
I'm still using an IDE RAID array but wonder if I should continue with that once I've switched to S-ATA. My MB supports both.

[Marshmallowman]

Setting you swap max=min will allocate a static swap space and you won't have to worry about your HDD fragging up. I usually do it straight after defraging the drive.

[UtwigMU]

There is also a free utility called pagedefrag (free download from sysinternals.com) that defrags registry and pagefiles uppon boot on Win NT4.0, 2k and XP. Partition for pagefile is not neccessary (I usually put one on OS partition), otherwise having one on RAID0 array would be best if it does not impede your video work.

[wkulecz]

Fragmented swap files is a "may happen". Extra head movement to skip over the potentially unused space of extra partitions happens everytime data access switches from one partition to the other.

--wally.