Partitioning - Help BADLY needed

[Jim82]

Hi there im new, Id hate to begin by asking a question but im badly in need of advice. I shall look around and help where I can

ive got an e-machines pc, and recently got a new hard drive. my windows is on restore disks, which use nortons ghost 7 to creat an image on the disk. When I used the restore disks on my new hard rive, they install fine, and windows starts up to take reg info etc. but when it restarts, it wont run, it just crashes.

seeing as Ive still got the old hd running as a slave, I changed it to master restored as normal. I have now activated windows and my plan is to install all my programmes, drivers etc, then use SYMANTEC GHOST 9 which has a function to copy all from one drive to another. After reading the help file this should work fine. any advice on this would be great, but my main question is:-

I focus mainly on video editing so what im planning is to put the OS and programmes into separate 'main' partition on my bigger new drive and a 2nd partition used for storage\encoding and the older slave I can use for storage - does this sound like the right way to go? The big hard drive is a 7200RPM 160GB and the slave is 60GB 5200RPM

MANY thanks for any help :thanks:

[Video Dude]

If you capture video it is best to dedicate a separate drive for that purpose. Even if you use a 2nd partition to capture video on the same drive as Windows you may experience dropped frames if Windows writes something to the drive in the background or accesses the swap file.

If you only encode or edit then the 2nd partition should be fine.


If that was my computer, I would use the 60GB 5200RPM as the master drive for Windows and programs and then dedicate the faster 7200RPM 160GB to capture video.

[Jim82]

Thanks a million for the advice. Should I do the the same (use the small 5200rpm as master) for encoding, would I get faster/better results using the big faster drive as a slave and do all the encoding\coverting on it? do I still get the same speed out a hd when its used as a slave?

thanks allot

[Video Dude]

Should I do the the same (use the small 5200rpm as master) for encoding, would I get faster/better results using the big faster drive as a slave and do all the encoding\coverting on it?It would be faster for your encoding to take place on the faster drive. The data will be able to be read/written faster. But for encoding, the CPU and RAM play a bigger role. The speed of the drive is more important for capturing.


do I still get the same speed out a hd when its used as a slave?Yes, in fact it might be a tiny percentage faster since it has no Windows overhead to do (no swap file access). It would be best if you placed the drives a different IDE chains.



If you are not capturing video (using a capture card) then I would use the faster bigger drive as the master drive with the two partitions, and the slower, smaller drive for storage.

[Jim82]

Video Dude, what can I say, you are a legend :thanks:

Because the slave will be faster, should I use it for my Virtual Memory page file or leave it on the main drive? Would the answer be yes for better general performance and to change it back to the slower drive if I was to ever capture video?

What do you mean by differant IDE chains?


Cheers, your a star :thanks:

[Video Dude]

Putting the swap file on a different partition is a subject of debate. Its up to you. Some people will say it is more optimal while most others will just leave it as default in the windows partition. My opinion is that the swap file should not be on the same drive that you use to capture video.

Computers have 2 IDE chains on the motherboard and each chain supports 2 devices. (You have more than two if you installed a controller card). If you open your computer you should see IDE ribbon cables. Each cable represents an IDE chain.

Looking back, I think that the 5200 rpm drive as master will slow your overall computer performance. I would first try to make the 5200 rpm drive as slave and if you get dropped frames from captuing video in the future then I would switch the drives.

[Jim82]

well ive been using the slower drive as master since my last post. All is well except while using my Bitorrent programme, it slows my web browsing. The settings within the bitorrent client seem fine and this never happened when the faster drive was the master so could this be the cause? If so, im gonna go for the fast drive as master...

Oh ye, one final question mate, for best performance should the partition on the large drive for OS and programmes be the same size as space used or bigger?


thanks a million youve been a great help

[Shinigami-Sama]

you always want extra space in the os partion/s for updates