Fdisking a dedicated partition to encode

[smokeslikeapoet]

I am partitioning a hard drive so I would have a dedicated partion to encode movies on. This wouldn't really increase the encode times, necessarily but it would prevent the large VOB and Wav files from becoming heavily fragmented during the ripping and audio portions of my encode. It would also prevent other files from getting fragmented.

Since I have a 60 GB hard drive. I am going to partition. 8 gigs for the OS (winxp) and Program files (Quake is the only game I play so I don't need much space for programs). Then I'll partition 12 Gigs for ripping encoding (initially I think that will be more than enough, I don't encode more that 2 discs at a time, and then only when I have a 2 dvd set). The remain 40 gigs will be for permanent storage of movies, mp3, and other docs.

Has anyone else tried this? Any suggestions?

[Bugs Bunny]

You'll be barely scraping by with 12 gigs. 8 gigs for the VOBs, 1.5 gig for the WAV, 2+ gigs for the 1st pass.

[smokeslikeapoet]

You're absolutely right, a mis-calc on my part. Man I need to get Partition Magic so I can play around with it, or better yet another 20 gig hard drive.

[legman]

The only file you need to worry about fragmenting is the win386.swp file in the 98 flavor of os. Delete it once with a boot disk and it will never fragment agin.

[ppera2]

Originally posted by legman
The only file you need to worry about fragmenting is the win386.swp file in the 98 flavor of os. Delete it once with a boot disk and it will never fragment agin.

????
It is not correct. It will fragment again and again...
Only way against frag. is to put swap file on dedicated partition, or use lot of RAM and disable swap file.

[mpucoder]

All that aside - my recomendation for any partition that is going to have only large files on it is to make the clusters as large as possible.
There is an undocumented parameter to FORMAT, /z:n
n is the number of sectors/cluster, and must be a power of two. The greatest allowed value is 64, making 32K clusters.
example:
format d: /u /z:64

[MaTTeR]

All of you are wrong about the VM file not fragmenting:D

If you don't want it to fragment then the min and max size has to be the exact same number. It's that easy. I'd suggest putting the swap file on any other physical drive (not partition) than the system drive. Ideally, you would have an extra drive that was dedictaed to the swap. I use a dedicated 9GB 7200RPM drive for my swap file only;)

EDIT- The reason why the method I suggest above doesn't fragment is because the swap file will never dyamically shrink or grow.

EDIT2- I agree with mpucoder about the clusters. My dedictaed swap drive is using 64k clusters.

[ppera2]

Matter - right. When set fixed size it will not fragment. But to achieve it, you must have nonfragmented partition first - where it goes.

And it is always better to work with 2 drives. I always make encoding etc. so that source is on one and dest. on another physical drive.

[smokeslikeapoet]

In WinXP if you format additional drives or partitions in the GUI using Disk Manager you can specify cluster size.

[MaTTeR]

Originally posted by smokeslikeapoet
In WinXP if you format additional drives or partitions in the GUI using Disk Manager you can specify cluster size.

And in Win2k;)