Drive choice for fresh install 1

[mmenarry]

OK, I'm about to do a fresh install of XP.

I have two drives that I could use to host the OS (XP Pro), so I have a few options.

Drive 1: 120 Gb 7200rpm 2mb cache (seagate)
Drive 2: 80 Gb 7200rpm 8mb cache (seimens)

Both drives are ATA133.

My current OS drive is an old 5400rpm unit, which has got to go (Packard Bell orginal drive)

Which would be better to use for the OS, I intend to partition off a logical drive for pagefile use as well?

My current set-up is CD-R/DVD-R (two separate drives) on one IDE channel, two hard drives on the other, it's what suits me best, I do a lot of video work and CD/DVD burning.

I'm assuming the 8mb cache drive would be best for the OS, but should I have the pagefile drive on the same drive as the OS, or on the other physical drive?
The drive not used for the OS will mainly be used for storing large files (500Mb to 10Gb)

so,
1. Which drive for the OS?
2. Which drive should have the pagefile?

Main objective is performance (speed)
Other info - 2.8GHz P4 800MHz bus 1gig 3200 ram

Cheers!

Michael

 

[IslandCustom]

My preference would be to install the OS on the faster of the two drives -- without checking specs, I would assume the 80GB drive is the faster of the two.

As far as the paging file is concerned, I would also place that on the 80GB drive, in a separate partition. From what I've read, there is little difference between having the paging file on a separate physical drive -- not to mention with 1GB of RAM the paging file will probably not get much "action."

In my opinion, a bigger concern is the way you have the drives set up. I also do video editing with separate physical drives. My OS and video editing software are on one drive, while the video files are all on my second drive. I have each drive on a separate controller since the editing software is then able to run on one physical drive while the video file being processed is on the second physical drive, and the controller does not become a bottleneck.

I'm using Pinnacle Studio 9. When I saw how long it was taking for the files to be processed, I checked Pinnacle's web site and it was their recommendation that increasing from 512MB to 1GB of RAM would show a negligible improvement, while separate physical drives on separate controllers would produce the greatest benefit. You might want to check to see if the manufacturer of your software has a recommendation that would benefit you.

So, in a nutshell, I would set up each controller with one hard drive and one optical drive. This also may be beneficial when making copies of CD's since one controller won't be handling the data transfer in both directions.

Best of luck to you.

Kevin

 

[micker377]

You are doing a fresh install of XP. Is this a fresh install on a computer that has been running XP, or a 98 machine you are going to clean up and install XP?

 

[mmenarry]

IslandCustom-
I'm definately considering splitting the controllers to each have an optical and physical drive, it does make sense, the processing involved in video is long enough that even a small improvement is a big time saving. Probably the way I will go is:
Channel 1: 80 gig OS drive / DVD-R burner
Channel 2: 120 gig storage drive / CD-R burner

Should allow me to do "on-the-fly" burning from one drive to the other, allow burning from the storage drive on one channel to the burner on the other, and processing on the OS drive storing onto the storage drive.

The 1 gig ram was to limit the use of the pagefile and the lovely fragmentation it causes if not in it's own partition, it's my processor that mainly does the work in my machine.

Star for you, Kevin!

Micker377
The current OS drive is (literally) the only remaining part of a 2-year old Packard Bell PC that I bought, everything else has been upgraded since (mobo, case, GPU, CPU, drives, Ram, PSU). So it originally had XP Home pre-installed by PB, all their proprietary software, and no original discs. At all. Not a sausage. No way of doing a proper install of the software, so it's carrying a lot of unnecessary baggage. It's time for a clean/fresh install to clear out the rubbish.

Michael

 

[micker377]

OK, I as just worried you may be trying to build an old P-B that wouldn't handle XP.

 

[IslandCustom]

Thanks for the star, Michael. Good luck to you, and I hope your video editing goes well.

Kevin