I recently had my OS's registry corrupted and need to reformat. This is an opportunity for me to reconfigure my hard drive setup, and also add a third hard drive.

so I'm thinking something like this

1. 160gb - Os and programs

I read that it is good to partition the OS and Programs to 20-30gb. Let me know your thoughts/ experiences in regards to a CPU for video editing but The supposed advantage of this is that it will be located in the outermost part of the drive.

Radified Hard Drive Partitioning Strategies (http://partition.radified.com/partitioning_2.htm)

"If you install your operating system to a single, large partition, there's nothing to prevent both system & program files, over time, from winding up at the far end of the drive (Windows updates, program updates, driver updates, etc.).

System and program files that wind up at the far end of the drive take longer to access, and are transferred at a slower rate, which translates into a less-responsive system. "


2. 500gb - Video - Raid is not an option


3. 5oogb - Music, graphics, export.


For best performance, which drive, 2 or 3, should the project file, video previews, audio previews, media cache, etc...be placed?

Thanks

Joe... Don't partition your drives. There's really no benefit and can force seeks to opposite edges of the platters which will slow you down. I used to sell software utilities into the DEC market, including a defragger and it had some logic in it that would move the most commonly accessed files to the same general area of the disk to minimize seeks. Now, that was 20 years ago and I don't know if products like Diskeeper do the same thing but I'd be surprised if they didn't. However, disk performance has increased dramatically over time so it's not as big a concern. If you really want to boost performance on your C: drive, you could get a 10k RPM unit. Many have said that you want as big a C: drive as possible and keep it as empty as possible for max performance. More files on disk can mean longer seek times and longer directory look-ups.

You don't mention what you're editing, but DV or HDV doesn't require RAID. My edit station has four internal drives. C: has programs and common files (logos, templates, etc.), D: has the swap file and CS3 cache files. I use E: and F: for projects. Since I often have more than one project going at a time, I'll keep all files for each project within one folder. It might be faster for the system to find them if I put them on separate drives, but it's easier for me to find them when they're all in one place.