Hard drive configuration?

Gints Klimanis · February 18th, 2004, 07:56 PM

Warning on using HD Tach:
DO NOT USE THE WRITE TEST ON DRIVES WITH USEFUL DATA.

The read test is safe, but the write test will annhilate all data on the drive.

Edward Troxel · February 18th, 2004, 09:22 PM

Let's do a "for instance": Suppose you partition a drive into two partitions and have your video files on one partition and then render to the second partition. In this case, you will slow down the drive because the head will be constantly moving back and forth between the partitions.

Glen Elliott · February 18th, 2004, 09:57 PM

XP automatically stores larger files on the outer edge of the hd. Ever wonder why theres large chunks waaayyy out on the end while defragging? ....

Gints Klimanis · February 18th, 2004, 10:01 PM

Defragging has to do with your defragger. In Norton, I notice that the middle of the disk is left empty. The most frequently used files are at the end of the disk while the infrequently used files are at the beginning of the disk.

Gints Klimanis · February 18th, 2004, 10:06 PM

Edward,

True. That usage of partitioning will not be wise.

For two partitions, a better way would be to keep your infrequently used files in the slower partition while keeping your
uncompressed video or source DV files in the faster partition.

Another usage would be for a temp directory for WinZip or
the disk compilation phase of CD or DVD burning.

One could reduce boot and app launch time by keeping Windows
and Programs Files on the faster partition.

Edward Troxel · February 18th, 2004, 10:24 PM

I'll agree that partitioning CAN have its uses but I would generally say that it is not necessary.

Bogdan Vaglarov · February 19th, 2004, 01:58 AM

I'm also wondering how to make my partitions on my new system.

BTW I've used Norton defrag on my Win Me notebook and to me it seems that the swap file and the frequently accessed files are always in the beginning of the disc. I don't say that means they are on the inner physical side. I doubt Norton will chose to put them on the slower 'end'. The non-frequently used files are gathered on the end.

Now on the disk space and partition usage.

Currently I can't afford putting 3 drives in my box (sweet small factor cubic). So my plan is to make the following set up.

HDD 1 (system & data) 160GB
May be 3 partitions:
1a. system 10GB;
1b. Rendering to MPEG2 (from 2a)
1c. the rest - data, docs, etc.;

HDD 2 (video, backup) >=160GB
May be 3 partitions:
2a) video capture, and related media
2b) DVD authoring (temp for burning the ready project) - 5 GB (is it enough for single DVD?);
2c) 5GB for system disk drive image (backup)

Now writing this even I've got confused. Where the actual editing should be done?
Generally my idea is to render to different disc, then to author again to different disc. Writing to the DVD shouldn't matter.
Any opinions?

Rob Lohman · February 19th, 2004, 06:12 AM

Sounds pretty okay to me. If your drives are empty or have
free space you can make partitions from within windows by
opening Computer Management under Administrative Tools.

If your harddisks are full you basically have the following options:

1) destroy the data on it (usually not good) and simply repartition / reformat the drive

2) move the data to some other drive / system / tape / media before doing the repartition / reformat

3) get yourself Partition Magic Pro. This program will allow you to move, resize, split / merge partitions without loosing the data on it. Ofcourse backupping up valuable stuff is needed because something can always go wrong with such drastic things!!

Gints Klimanis · February 19th, 2004, 03:02 PM

I benchmarked a number of disks, ranging from the 40GB Seagates at work to my 120 GB and 180 GBs at home. I
haven't benchmarked my 250 GBs though. My conclusion is
that two partitions would offer a disk that can do about the data bandwidth in the first partition as the last on the 40 GBs. That's
double the bandwidth and well worth it.

There is less of a performance variation (only about 30%) in sequential read speed on the 120 and 180 GBs. I'm wondering if this is due to their connection to a my Rocket RAID controller card (not in RAID confuguration, though) rather than the motherboard IDE connectors.

Gints Klimanis · February 19th, 2004, 03:06 PM

Bogden,

If you're making that many partitions, put your high bandwidth
stuff (system 10G and DVD temp) on the lowest partitions.
Recently, I've learned that the outer tracks on a disk offer the greatest bandwidth and that partitions are allocated starting with
the outer disk zones. I'll try to find a web article. My storage specialist friend tells me that this is common practice among disk specialists. It's too bad that this great info doesn't see more sun.

Bogdan Vaglarov · February 19th, 2004, 04:19 PM

Thanks for the replays.

Gint, although I understand your point it's still confusing what you are saying.

So it's clear the outer physical zonez on the disc allow for higher speeds.

The question is where is the logical beggining of the disk. Till now I always asumed that the beggining (represented by bar or table) showed by the software is where the beginning of the physical drive (hence the outer zones).

For CD/DVD I asume same - the graphical representation by the software shows the begining at left but everybody knows the physical beginning of this discs is on the inside tracks.

I don't think you should really care which is the physical beggining of any disc - the OS or utility will show it always on the left side of the bar/graph.

I don'tknow how the nations writing from right to left will implement this my strategy though (just kidding).

Gints Klimanis · February 19th, 2004, 04:54 PM

Hard disk partitions are allocated from outside to inside. CDs and DVDs are just the opposite, inside to outside. Using the WindowsXP tool or Partition Magic, the first partition will appear on the left side.

Use the HD Tach tool to help you identify speed regions.
http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public...request=HdTach

It's quite clear from the graph that the outer tracks or "beginning"of the drive offer about twice the bandwidth of the inner tracks from this graph:

http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public...st=HdTachUsage

As mentioned in another thread, it's not so easy to see the steps in the zone speeds on the HF Tach 2.70 graph. 2.61 offers a sharper graph that shows the speed zones better. email me if you really want that revision.

Gints Klimanis · February 19th, 2004, 05:02 PM

Although my 40 GB drives showed a 50% dropoff in bandwidth on HD Tach sequential read speed, my other drives 120 and 180 GB didn't show as large a dropoff. I'll test my 250 GB tonight.

Bogdan Vaglarov · February 19th, 2004, 09:19 PM

Gint, I know well HD Tach - it's used in from many testing and review sites.

English is not my native language so I was trying to make it transperent because it really sound a bit mixing this way.

In other word what you see on the left side of the graf (no matter HD Tach, Partition Magic or Win XP disk manegement) is the faster region which heppans to be physically the outer disc region. Did it become more confusing.

Anyway I think we are talking about same thing.

In this context I think partitioning and the speed of the partiqular partition will depend on one more fact.
Modern big drive reside 2 physical plater each with it's own head.

If your partition 1 is smaller than the first plater it will be served by 1 head. If partition 2 happens to ocupy space from both platers it might be faster as the data can be scatered on the to platers and served by 2 heads.

Thats why the recent trend is that bigger drives are faster and also people do not make partitions but leave the drive as a single partition. With NTFS you don't lose space as the clusters are always 4kB. In Fat 32 partition above 32 GB will use 32kB for clusters which is huge waist of space.

Anyway I whish you successful testing. My current aim doesnt include uncompressed video so I'm fine without top speed.
Cheers, Bogdan

Bogdan Vaglarov · February 22nd, 2004, 11:06 AM

Sorry everybody, apparently my therory was wrong.

After a bit more research I found that actually disk platers are using both sides for writing. Usually the first side of the first plater is reserved from the drive and not used for data.
So when the first partition is made half is written on one side of the first platter and second half is written on a side from the seccond platter. There are also many read/write heads flying over these surfaces. Eg. 10GB partition would be written as 5GB on the side B on platter 1 and 5GB on lets say side A on platter 2.

In addition the outer faster turning tracks are with lower density and the inner tracks are layered with higher density to compensate for the lower speed. So virtually the drives are designed to be equally fast on the whole surface area. The benchmarks show slightly different picture as we see.

February 19th, 2004, 06:12 AM	#23
Rob Lohman RED Code Chef Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Holland Posts: 12,514	Sounds pretty okay to me. If your drives are empty or have free space you can make partitions from within windows by opening Computer Management under Administrative Tools. If your harddisks are full you basically have the following options: 1) destroy the data on it (usually not good) and simply repartition / reformat the drive 2) move the data to some other drive / system / tape / media before doing the repartition / reformat 3) get yourself Partition Magic Pro. This program will allow you to move, resize, split / merge partitions without loosing the data on it. Ofcourse backupping up valuable stuff is needed because something can always go wrong with such drastic things!! __________________ Rob Lohman, visuar@iname.com DV Info Wrangler & RED Code Chef Join the DV Challenge \| Lady X Search DVinfo.net for quick answers \| Buy from the best: DVinfo.net sponsors

February 22nd, 2004, 11:06 AM	#30
Bogdan Vaglarov Major Player Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Yokohama, Japan Posts: 366	hard drive physics correction Sorry everybody, apparently my therory was wrong. After a bit more research I found that actually disk platers are using both sides for writing. Usually the first side of the first plater is reserved from the drive and not used for data. So when the first partition is made half is written on one side of the first platter and second half is written on a side from the seccond platter. There are also many read/write heads flying over these surfaces. Eg. 10GB partition would be written as 5GB on the side B on platter 1 and 5GB on lets say side A on platter 2. In addition the outer faster turning tracks are with lower density and the inner tracks are layered with higher density to compensate for the lower speed. So virtually the drives are designed to be equally fast on the whole surface area. The benchmarks show slightly different picture as we see.

February 18th, 2004, 07:56 PM	#16
Gints Klimanis Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: San Jose, CA Posts: 2,222	Warning on using HD Tach: DO NOT USE THE WRITE TEST ON DRIVES WITH USEFUL DATA. The read test is safe, but the write test will annhilate all data on the drive.

February 18th, 2004, 09:22 PM	#17
Edward Troxel Sponsor: JET DV Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Southern Illinois Posts: 7,953	Let's do a "for instance": Suppose you partition a drive into two partitions and have your video files on one partition and then render to the second partition. In this case, you will slow down the drive because the head will be constantly moving back and forth between the partitions.

February 18th, 2004, 09:57 PM	#18
Glen Elliott Wrangler Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Philadelphia, PA Posts: 2,898	XP automatically stores larger files on the outer edge of the hd. Ever wonder why theres large chunks waaayyy out on the end while defragging? ....

February 18th, 2004, 10:01 PM	#19
Gints Klimanis Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: San Jose, CA Posts: 2,222	Defragging has to do with your defragger. In Norton, I notice that the middle of the disk is left empty. The most frequently used files are at the end of the disk while the infrequently used files are at the beginning of the disk.

February 18th, 2004, 10:06 PM	#20
Gints Klimanis Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: San Jose, CA Posts: 2,222	Edward, True. That usage of partitioning will not be wise. For two partitions, a better way would be to keep your infrequently used files in the slower partition while keeping your uncompressed video or source DV files in the faster partition. Another usage would be for a temp directory for WinZip or the disk compilation phase of CD or DVD burning. One could reduce boot and app launch time by keeping Windows and Programs Files on the faster partition.

February 18th, 2004, 10:24 PM	#21
Edward Troxel Sponsor: JET DV Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Southern Illinois Posts: 7,953	I'll agree that partitioning CAN have its uses but I would generally say that it is not necessary.

February 19th, 2004, 01:58 AM	#22
Bogdan Vaglarov Major Player Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Yokohama, Japan Posts: 366	I'm also wondering how to make my partitions on my new system. BTW I've used Norton defrag on my Win Me notebook and to me it seems that the swap file and the frequently accessed files are always in the beginning of the disc. I don't say that means they are on the inner physical side. I doubt Norton will chose to put them on the slower 'end'. The non-frequently used files are gathered on the end. Now on the disk space and partition usage. Currently I can't afford putting 3 drives in my box (sweet small factor cubic). So my plan is to make the following set up. HDD 1 (system & data) 160GB May be 3 partitions: 1a. system 10GB; 1b. Rendering to MPEG2 (from 2a) 1c. the rest - data, docs, etc.; HDD 2 (video, backup) >=160GB May be 3 partitions: 2a) video capture, and related media 2b) DVD authoring (temp for burning the ready project) - 5 GB (is it enough for single DVD?); 2c) 5GB for system disk drive image (backup) Now writing this even I've got confused. Where the actual editing should be done? Generally my idea is to render to different disc, then to author again to different disc. Writing to the DVD shouldn't matter. Any opinions?

February 19th, 2004, 03:02 PM	#24
Gints Klimanis Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: San Jose, CA Posts: 2,222	I benchmarked a number of disks, ranging from the 40GB Seagates at work to my 120 GB and 180 GBs at home. I haven't benchmarked my 250 GBs though. My conclusion is that two partitions would offer a disk that can do about the data bandwidth in the first partition as the last on the 40 GBs. That's double the bandwidth and well worth it. There is less of a performance variation (only about 30%) in sequential read speed on the 120 and 180 GBs. I'm wondering if this is due to their connection to a my Rocket RAID controller card (not in RAID confuguration, though) rather than the motherboard IDE connectors.

February 19th, 2004, 03:06 PM	#25
Gints Klimanis Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: San Jose, CA Posts: 2,222	Bogden, If you're making that many partitions, put your high bandwidth stuff (system 10G and DVD temp) on the lowest partitions. Recently, I've learned that the outer tracks on a disk offer the greatest bandwidth and that partitions are allocated starting with the outer disk zones. I'll try to find a web article. My storage specialist friend tells me that this is common practice among disk specialists. It's too bad that this great info doesn't see more sun.

February 19th, 2004, 04:19 PM	#26
Bogdan Vaglarov Major Player Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Yokohama, Japan Posts: 366	Thanks for the replays. Gint, although I understand your point it's still confusing what you are saying. So it's clear the outer physical zonez on the disc allow for higher speeds. The question is where is the logical beggining of the disk. Till now I always asumed that the beggining (represented by bar or table) showed by the software is where the beginning of the physical drive (hence the outer zones). For CD/DVD I asume same - the graphical representation by the software shows the begining at left but everybody knows the physical beginning of this discs is on the inside tracks. I don't think you should really care which is the physical beggining of any disc - the OS or utility will show it always on the left side of the bar/graph. I don'tknow how the nations writing from right to left will implement this my strategy though (just kidding).

February 19th, 2004, 04:54 PM	#27
Gints Klimanis Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: San Jose, CA Posts: 2,222	Hard disk partitions are allocated from outside to inside. CDs and DVDs are just the opposite, inside to outside. Using the WindowsXP tool or Partition Magic, the first partition will appear on the left side. Use the HD Tach tool to help you identify speed regions. http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public...request=HdTach It's quite clear from the graph that the outer tracks or "beginning"of the drive offer about twice the bandwidth of the inner tracks from this graph: http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public...st=HdTachUsage As mentioned in another thread, it's not so easy to see the steps in the zone speeds on the HF Tach 2.70 graph. 2.61 offers a sharper graph that shows the speed zones better. email me if you really want that revision.

February 19th, 2004, 05:02 PM	#28
Gints Klimanis Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: San Jose, CA Posts: 2,222	Although my 40 GB drives showed a 50% dropoff in bandwidth on HD Tach sequential read speed, my other drives 120 and 180 GB didn't show as large a dropoff. I'll test my 250 GB tonight.

February 19th, 2004, 09:19 PM	#29
Bogdan Vaglarov Major Player Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Yokohama, Japan Posts: 366	Gint, I know well HD Tach - it's used in from many testing and review sites. English is not my native language so I was trying to make it transperent because it really sound a bit mixing this way. In other word what you see on the left side of the graf (no matter HD Tach, Partition Magic or Win XP disk manegement) is the faster region which heppans to be physically the outer disc region. Did it become more confusing. Anyway I think we are talking about same thing. In this context I think partitioning and the speed of the partiqular partition will depend on one more fact. Modern big drive reside 2 physical plater each with it's own head. If your partition 1 is smaller than the first plater it will be served by 1 head. If partition 2 happens to ocupy space from both platers it might be faster as the data can be scatered on the to platers and served by 2 heads. Thats why the recent trend is that bigger drives are faster and also people do not make partitions but leave the drive as a single partition. With NTFS you don't lose space as the clusters are always 4kB. In Fat 32 partition above 32 GB will use 32kB for clusters which is huge waist of space. Anyway I whish you successful testing. My current aim doesnt include uncompressed video so I'm fine without top speed. Cheers, Bogdan