Request suggestions for drive setup, partitions

[UtwigMU]

Originally posted by Wombat
Utwig: Yes, I have an image of my XP drive on CD, but it's a minimal one. Keeping it on the HD is faster, and he could easily update it weekly or something this way without spending a lot of time and CDs. He's got room to play, so why not?

I use prooven wersions for work, so a complete install of all apps and drivers (5.01 Powerdesk or later, will I see a difference in my Photoshop?) with all preferences and net connection set is all I need. So I have image of my June install and use that. When I significantly change hardware I'll reinstall everything and update to new versions.

98 is just bare OS and DX8.1 and I frequently install and uninstall games so that image also suffices. Latest or before latest powerdesk for 98 - I don't care.

[Slugbait]

Originally I was thinking about doing dual-boot, primarily because I'm so comfortable with Win98 and know how to secure it. Plus, I occassionally like to play Glide games, and I was concerned with other software and hardware, like my scanner and firewall.

Well, I verified my scanner works fine in XP. I lose some software features of my Epson 740 printer, but it still does the basics. And perhaps I can get those x3dfx drivers to work...but if not, I have a slower machine with SLI, so maybe buying a V5 PCI last year was overkill...

So I decided to go for it, and just do XP. Heck, I can always rebuild again if it doesn't work out the way I want.

I'm going to leave both drives on the same cable (maybe get an ATA card in the future). WD will be the primary, partitioned 5G for the OS, the rest for capture and editing. The IBM will be for apps/games and backups.

I've got one more CD to burn (backing up files), and then I'm gonna rip my box open and get started.

[Slugbait]

Oh, BTW, thanks for all the suggestions...and that Ars link was a hoot, too (but still somewhat informative)

[Tapeworm]

Wombat,

I still have a fair amount of fragmentation running Win2K & NTFS on a single ATA-133 drive when I load hours of material at a time. You're certainly right though, FAT would be totally unusable compared to NTFS, which is what makes the cheap, high quality editing even possible.

Our older system with 4-18 gig LVD drives and dual 2940 controllers striped across all the drives with two partitions on NT4 (required for Discreet edit 6.0) has less of a problem, but still works better if we reformat after each major project.

[UtwigMU]

Use something for defragmentation like diskeeper.