question re: partitioned hard discs at DVinfo.net

Adi Head · April 23rd, 2003, 02:40 PM

most of the computer specs i've seen for nle had more than one hard disc. one usually for the operating system (around 40GB) and the other for video storage (80GB, 120GB, or more).

if for starters, i want 80GB of storage, couldn't i just get ONE hard disc of 120GB, have it partitioned? isn't a partitioned hard disc the same as two seperate discs?

K. Forman · April 23rd, 2003, 02:46 PM

That's not recommended, for various reasons, namely speed. You are better off having the second drive.

Andre De Clercq · April 23rd, 2003, 03:28 PM

A partitioned disc is still controlled by the same controller (master and slave) and this can result in longer access times and thus "speed" reduction of the system.

Jan Roovers · April 23rd, 2003, 05:06 PM

Adi

You can test the performance of yr disk on this site:

<URL>http://www.pcpitstop.com/pcpitstop/default.asp</URL>

You can see if the uncached speed is enough.

Be sure to have the video disk well defragemented for satisfying results when capturing video.

Jan

Garret Ambrosio · April 23rd, 2003, 07:37 PM

Arghhh, I hate to go against the crowd but I think you guys may have this one wrong. If you partition a drive, this doesn't slow down the HDD. In fact quite the opposite will happen, since you are essentially you are taking the physical drive and breaking it up into smaller logical drives. This may strain your primary partition a bit, but it should hardly be noticeable. The partition will fly because it doesn't need to access the whole drive in order to access the data that is resident in a logical partition.

In fact the optimal configuration for a Windows machine, would be to create a smaller OS partition which is decicated to the OS and the OS alone and create a specific partition for the Paging or Swap file. This will optimize the paging file read writes.

But, now this is the but, for video it is more efficient to use a dedicated drive outside of the OS drive because of what people here have explained, on the physical, hardware level, video taxes the hardware in order to maintain data rate to allow constant frame rate and quality. It is even more benefitial to use a different bus (secondary IDE or RAID card) for use in Video or CD-Burning.

Here's the second but, but if your OS is NOT having to access the paging file or the OS directory often during capture or playback or rendering, you will however can get good performance using as you propose a single drive using three partitions, one for the OS, one for the paging file and the tertiary for video. You can acheive this by adding 1.5 GB or more of RAM which will have enough free ram to accomodate the OS requirements and paging will be less or not necessary. Having a large L2 as in the Barton Core AMD chips or the Intel Zenon can help assure that the paging file is rarely hit and the OS will have enough space in the RAM.

Adrian Douglas · April 23rd, 2003, 11:05 PM

Adi,

basically, what everyone here is saying is correct. For my NLE machine I have one HDD running the OS/Apps on on partition (c: - 4GB), any other files (non-video) on a second partition (f: - 9GB) and a third partition for the swap/page file (x: -1.5GB - 3x the installed 512MB RAM). For the video files I have a seperate SCSI disk on a PCI SCSI controller. Now, this system was built 3 years ago before ATA100 drives were available, you don't need a SCSI drive unless you plan to do uncompressed (Beta SP/SX Digibeta etc) editing, but the point is to build a stable, high-performance video system you are best off using a second hard drive for your video files only.

The same goes for laptop editing. You can edit successfully on a laptop with a partitioned drive, I do with my Dell Inspiron, to gain max performance and reliability it is best to use an external firewire drive for the video media.

Alex Taylor · April 23rd, 2003, 11:09 PM

I agree with Garret, paritioned drives would perform better as they don't need to read the whole hard drive at once. It's probably not a big issue now with NTFS but back in the days of FAT16 drives, partitioning made storage more efficient; the way hard drives store files with older file systems, there was a great deal that wasn't being used efficiently because the HD stores data in equal-sized clusters.

Anyway, the optimal setup would be a separate drive for your OS and video capture, on a different IDE channel or even RAID if you can swing it.

Garret Ambrosio · April 24th, 2003, 02:08 AM

Alex, definitely, a Raid 0 or Striping can triple the space and double access times. Great way to go.

Andre De Clercq · April 24th, 2003, 04:00 AM

Garret, I am not convinced that I "got it wrong" . Paritioned disc for video is the wrong way to go and reduces "speed"as a whole. Swapping ,which, given the cheap rams can easely be avoided by setting it "off" in the registry. The amount needed for a given application can allway be verified . I did this 2 years ago for my NLE. So swapping in an old fashioned method for video. Unfortunately there are other running systems on a PC that want to access the OS...which makes continious R/W more difficult and give a negative influence on the "speed" performance of the system

Lars Siden · April 24th, 2003, 05:53 AM

Hello Adi,

I would say that it depends on HOW you're using the computer. If you multitask some other programs while running the NLE, I would recommend to have system and NLE on different discs not just separate partitions. That is mainly because if you are writing to partion 2 where the NLE is stored while you're reading on partion 1, you heads on the HDD will move back & forth alot and degrading the speed.

One other thing to keep in mind is having a "small" system partion ( and by small I mean < 10 gb ), you could install the system with all its drivers and your most used programs. Take a ghost copy of the system partion....and then when the system is infected by a virus or just behaves strange & slow...you can "ghost"-back your system partiotion in perfect order.

Just my 2$...

// Lazze

ps. You can ghost to another HDD, like an extern FW/USB2 disc ds.

Lars Siden · April 24th, 2003, 05:59 AM

Garret,

>Alex, definitely, a Raid 0 or Striping can triple the space and >double access times. Great way to go.

Not to be picky, but sure you mean

1. Halve the access time
2. Double the space... striping is just 2 discs.

When striping - do keep in mind that you double the risk of dataloss. To be on the safe side, go for Raid 1+0, uses 4 discs but then you get mirror + stripe

// Lazze

ps. Can recommend the following sites for reading up on HDD:s and raid:

http://www.tomshardware.com/
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/
http://www.storagereview.com/

ds.

Garret Ambrosio · April 24th, 2003, 07:36 PM

Lars. striping can be done with 2 or more identical disks to prevent wasted space. I've always striped 3 or more for the capacity (size of the smallest drive int he array* thenumber of drives) Access times usually ~double because the stripe is written throughout all the HDDs. Yes, you are right there is no fault tolerance when it comes to RAID 0. but that's the give and take. You can select RAID 1+0 or RAID 10, but like you said you would have a mirrored stripe. Raid level 5 would be ideal, but then you would give up performance. so they all have their give and take. But I agree with you, about how the system is used when partitioning HDDs. As I indicated, depends on your demands of your PC, but partitioning can be done optimal in certain types of applications and usage.

Dylan Couper · April 24th, 2003, 08:00 PM

Just buy two seperate HD's. That way if one smokes, you still have the other.

Lars Siden · April 26th, 2003, 01:56 PM

Garret,

Sorry, of course you're right.... You may stripe X numbers of drives... I was drunk or tired...or both ;-)

Today I'd a lovely day ...decided it was finally time for re-install. So I spent my day getting all the drivers back in place...and updates...and programs... but the machine feels much healthier and quicker now...for a while until next time *s*

// Lazze

April 23rd, 2003, 02:40 PM	#1
Adi Head Major Player Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Brooklyn, NY Posts: 642	question re: partitioned hard discs most of the computer specs i've seen for nle had more than one hard disc. one usually for the operating system (around 40GB) and the other for video storage (80GB, 120GB, or more). if for starters, i want 80GB of storage, couldn't i just get ONE hard disc of 120GB, have it partitioned? isn't a partitioned hard disc the same as two seperate discs?

April 23rd, 2003, 05:06 PM	#4
Jan Roovers Regular Crew Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Amsterdam NL -Turnhout BE Posts: 158	Adi You can test the performance of yr disk on this site: <URL>http://www.pcpitstop.com/pcpitstop/default.asp</URL> You can see if the uncached speed is enough. Be sure to have the video disk well defragemented for satisfying results when capturing video. Jan __________________ ___________ Jan Roovers www.jtv.be

April 23rd, 2003, 07:37 PM	#5
Garret Ambrosio Major Player Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Vallejo, CA Posts: 263	Arghhh, I hate to go against the crowd but I think you guys may have this one wrong. If you partition a drive, this doesn't slow down the HDD. In fact quite the opposite will happen, since you are essentially you are taking the physical drive and breaking it up into smaller logical drives. This may strain your primary partition a bit, but it should hardly be noticeable. The partition will fly because it doesn't need to access the whole drive in order to access the data that is resident in a logical partition. In fact the optimal configuration for a Windows machine, would be to create a smaller OS partition which is decicated to the OS and the OS alone and create a specific partition for the Paging or Swap file. This will optimize the paging file read writes. But, now this is the but, for video it is more efficient to use a dedicated drive outside of the OS drive because of what people here have explained, on the physical, hardware level, video taxes the hardware in order to maintain data rate to allow constant frame rate and quality. It is even more benefitial to use a different bus (secondary IDE or RAID card) for use in Video or CD-Burning. Here's the second but, but if your OS is NOT having to access the paging file or the OS directory often during capture or playback or rendering, you will however can get good performance using as you propose a single drive using three partitions, one for the OS, one for the paging file and the tertiary for video. You can acheive this by adding 1.5 GB or more of RAM which will have enough free ram to accomodate the OS requirements and paging will be less or not necessary. Having a large L2 as in the Barton Core AMD chips or the Intel Zenon can help assure that the paging file is rarely hit and the OS will have enough space in the RAM. __________________ "USA Today has come out with a new survey - apparently, three out of every four people make up 75% of the population." -David Letterman

April 23rd, 2003, 11:05 PM	#6
Adrian Douglas Trustee Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Chigasaki, Japan. Posts: 1,660	Adi, basically, what everyone here is saying is correct. For my NLE machine I have one HDD running the OS/Apps on on partition (c: - 4GB), any other files (non-video) on a second partition (f: - 9GB) and a third partition for the swap/page file (x: -1.5GB - 3x the installed 512MB RAM). For the video files I have a seperate SCSI disk on a PCI SCSI controller. Now, this system was built 3 years ago before ATA100 drives were available, you don't need a SCSI drive unless you plan to do uncompressed (Beta SP/SX Digibeta etc) editing, but the point is to build a stable, high-performance video system you are best off using a second hard drive for your video files only. The same goes for laptop editing. You can edit successfully on a laptop with a partitioned drive, I do with my Dell Inspiron, to gain max performance and reliability it is best to use an external firewire drive for the video media. __________________ Adrian DVInfo.net Search for quick answers Where to buy? From the best in the business...DVInfo.net sponsors

April 23rd, 2003, 11:09 PM	#7
Alex Taylor Major Player Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Vancouver, BC Posts: 390	I agree with Garret, paritioned drives would perform better as they don't need to read the whole hard drive at once. It's probably not a big issue now with NTFS but back in the days of FAT16 drives, partitioning made storage more efficient; the way hard drives store files with older file systems, there was a great deal that wasn't being used efficiently because the HD stores data in equal-sized clusters. Anyway, the optimal setup would be a separate drive for your OS and video capture, on a different IDE channel or even RAID if you can swing it. __________________ alextaylor.org

April 23rd, 2003, 02:46 PM	#2
K. Forman Capt. Quirk Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Middle of the woods in Georgia Posts: 3,596	That's not recommended, for various reasons, namely speed. You are better off having the second drive.

April 23rd, 2003, 03:28 PM	#3
Andre De Clercq Major Player Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Belgium Posts: 804	A partitioned disc is still controlled by the same controller (master and slave) and this can result in longer access times and thus "speed" reduction of the system.

April 24th, 2003, 02:08 AM	#8
Garret Ambrosio Major Player Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Vallejo, CA Posts: 263	Alex, definitely, a Raid 0 or Striping can triple the space and double access times. Great way to go. __________________ "USA Today has come out with a new survey - apparently, three out of every four people make up 75% of the population." -David Letterman

April 24th, 2003, 04:00 AM	#9
Andre De Clercq Major Player Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Belgium Posts: 804	Garret, I am not convinced that I "got it wrong" . Paritioned disc for video is the wrong way to go and reduces "speed"as a whole. Swapping ,which, given the cheap rams can easely be avoided by setting it "off" in the registry. The amount needed for a given application can allway be verified . I did this 2 years ago for my NLE. So swapping in an old fashioned method for video. Unfortunately there are other running systems on a PC that want to access the OS...which makes continious R/W more difficult and give a negative influence on the "speed" performance of the system

April 24th, 2003, 05:53 AM	#10
Lars Siden Major Player Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Sweden, Stockholm Posts: 469	Hello Adi, I would say that it depends on HOW you're using the computer. If you multitask some other programs while running the NLE, I would recommend to have system and NLE on different discs not just separate partitions. That is mainly because if you are writing to partion 2 where the NLE is stored while you're reading on partion 1, you heads on the HDD will move back & forth alot and degrading the speed. One other thing to keep in mind is having a "small" system partion ( and by small I mean < 10 gb ), you could install the system with all its drivers and your most used programs. Take a ghost copy of the system partion....and then when the system is infected by a virus or just behaves strange & slow...you can "ghost"-back your system partiotion in perfect order. Just my 2$... // Lazze ps. You can ghost to another HDD, like an extern FW/USB2 disc ds. __________________ Sony HDR-CX130,Canon 5DMKII,i7 930@4.0, 12gb memory, 3x SSD + 2x1Tb(stripe), Geforce 480, Dual 24", Win 7 x64

April 24th, 2003, 05:59 AM	#11
Lars Siden Major Player Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Sweden, Stockholm Posts: 469	Garret, >Alex, definitely, a Raid 0 or Striping can triple the space and >double access times. Great way to go. Not to be picky, but sure you mean 1. Halve the access time 2. Double the space... striping is just 2 discs. When striping - do keep in mind that you double the risk of dataloss. To be on the safe side, go for Raid 1+0, uses 4 discs but then you get mirror + stripe // Lazze ps. Can recommend the following sites for reading up on HDD:s and raid: http://www.tomshardware.com/ http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/ http://www.storagereview.com/ ds. __________________ Sony HDR-CX130,Canon 5DMKII,i7 930@4.0, 12gb memory, 3x SSD + 2x1Tb(stripe), Geforce 480, Dual 24", Win 7 x64

April 24th, 2003, 07:36 PM	#12
Garret Ambrosio Major Player Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Vallejo, CA Posts: 263	Lars. striping can be done with 2 or more identical disks to prevent wasted space. I've always striped 3 or more for the capacity (size of the smallest drive int he array* thenumber of drives) Access times usually ~double because the stripe is written throughout all the HDDs. Yes, you are right there is no fault tolerance when it comes to RAID 0. but that's the give and take. You can select RAID 1+0 or RAID 10, but like you said you would have a mirrored stripe. Raid level 5 would be ideal, but then you would give up performance. so they all have their give and take. But I agree with you, about how the system is used when partitioning HDDs. As I indicated, depends on your demands of your PC, but partitioning can be done optimal in certain types of applications and usage. __________________ "USA Today has come out with a new survey - apparently, three out of every four people make up 75% of the population." -David Letterman

April 24th, 2003, 08:00 PM	#13
Dylan Couper Wrangler Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: Vancouver, British Columbia Posts: 8,314	Just buy two seperate HD's. That way if one smokes, you still have the other. __________________ Need to rent camera gear in Vancouver BC? Check me out at camerarentalsvancouver.com

April 26th, 2003, 01:56 PM	#14
Lars Siden Major Player Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Sweden, Stockholm Posts: 469	Garret, Sorry, of course you're right.... You may stripe X numbers of drives... I was drunk or tired...or both ;-) Today I'd a lovely day ...decided it was finally time for re-install. So I spent my day getting all the drivers back in place...and updates...and programs... but the machine feels much healthier and quicker now...for a while until next time s // Lazze __________________ Sony HDR-CX130,Canon 5DMKII,i7 930@4.0, 12gb memory, 3x SSD + 2x1Tb(stripe), Geforce 480, Dual 24", Win 7 x64