Question about a Harddisk for PC recording

[Ralph khoury]

Now i have a Western digital 40 GB 7200 rpm (2x20gb partitions)
i am gonna order a Seagate 120GB 7200 rpm for 113us$

how do u think i should manage the hard disks, like how many paritions for the new hard disk, and what files should be included in each partition?
i am also a pc gamer, where should i put my games?

[bduersch]

For recording, partitioning is really bad. Think of it this way... partitioning a hard drive is a physical process... it's essentially saying 50% of the drive (the inner cylinders) will be C: and the other 50% (the outer cylinders) will be D:. So if you have your operating system on C and data files on D, every time you want to access the files on D the drive heads have to physically move much farther than if you hadn't partitioned the drive to begin with. Since OS files (particularly virtual memory) are accessed quite frequently, the drive heads spend a lot of time travelling back and forth, which is wasted time that results in reduced throughput.

If I were you, I would unpartition the 40Gb drive and put the OS and games on it, then dedicate the 120Gb drive to recording. Or if you don't plan on doing a ton of recording, reverse them... put the OS and games on the 120Gb drive and use the 40Gb for recording. But from a sheer performance perspective, partitioning is not a good approach to take.

That said, with lots of files on a single partition, regularly cleaning up old/temp files and defragmenting the drive becomes really important!

--B

[Ralph khoury]

Thx a lot for ur advice Bduersch.

[JESTER700]

The above is true, but sometimes partitioning makes sense. I have 2 partitions on my drives (Same setup as yours, actually, except my 2nd drive is Hitachi). But I specifically use the 2nd partitions for stuff I don't use much and for which speed doesn't matter. Downloaded files, pictures, and other media, for example. For audio files used in multitrack recording or video files in multicam editing & rendering, I use my E drive - the first partition of my big capture drive. I do try to only keep OS and progs on C, for ease of defrag & backup.

[Polaris20]

If you only have one drive, you must partition it to record. Otherwise you'll have a fragmented mess with audio. My friend's computer, running an Athlon 2200+ with a 120gig drive partitioned 2 ways records 2 24/48 tracks in with about 18 tracks being played back with no trouble.