Topic: Partitioning a Drive

[dmonterisi]

So I've started a process of completely wiping my PC clean and reinstalling windows and software since the machine has been giving me all sorts of problems for the past month. the biggest problems were that the computer would recognize my internal cd-r/dvd-rom drive and external dvd-r drive but wouldn't access them and no programs could use them.  so i did a reinstall of windows yesterday and only installed nero and archived almost everything off my computer.  the only thing i didn't archive was my 30 gig Ituned database, but i was able to move that around.

so i have 2 HD's.  an 80 gig and a 120gig. the 80 gig is the root drive and i've put 3 partitions on it: 30gigs for windows and software (i know it's overkill), 10gigs for a second xp boot for photoshop (I want to experiment and see if i get an improvement in performance from the dual boot set up), and 40 gigs for the Itunes database.

now, i'm going to reformat and repartion the 120 gig drive, which will be a storage drive.  It will be used for storing photographs (these can get very large when i'm working with multiple layer images in photoshop), audio files and general stuff.  what do you think is the best way to partition this drive?  I was thinking about doing 4 partitions: 1 for photoshop storage, 1 for audio file storage, 1 for wavelab working files, and 1 as a mirror for my root windows installation (as a backup).  does this make sense?  I need more storage space with the size of 24bit files and whatnot, but i'm not sure when i'll be building my new computer so i'm not going to buy a new drive right now (my current machine doesn't have an SATA controller so i don't want to buy a drive that won't work when i build my new machine).  I'll just have to archive stuff more frequently.  I figure it's easier to keep these partitions defragmented if they are smaller, rather than stroring phots and music on the same partition.  also, what about a photoshop scratch disk, should that be on the root drive or on the storage drive?  i would think the storage drive, but i'm not sure.

thanks for any suggestions.

[MattD]

PS scratch disk should ideally not be on either root (where the program resides) or on the storage drive as it will need to read and process information from both sources. I'm talking physical drive here, not just partition. Do you have any old HDs lying around? Even a 2-4 GB drive would be big enough for a scratch disk either for PS or audio.

BTW, I need to split up that Bob Schneider show for you one of these years.

[fozzy]

I would recommend if you are planning on mirroring you windows drive to at least put it on the other ide controller either way w/ and IDE system and the audio/graphics program you are going to take a significant performance hit.  I would consider doing a nightly/daily ghost type image during a point in time where the system is not being used to a partition on the 120gig drive.  You loose some redundancy and would have to roll back 24hours to get the machine back but i think for your hardware config that might be a better solution, also i believe you have to run 2000 server to do RAID1 software mirroring natively w/ windows but i'm sure there is software out there that will work in xp/2000 but i can't name any off the top of my head.


PS scratch: i would suggest against a smaller disk because they generally have much slower performance than the newer disks.  for a 2 drive setup although definately not ideal a scratch partition should be on the PS storage drive b/c otherwise i believe you would easilly saturate the IDE bandwidth across the IDE controller and possibly slowdown the whole system.  I may be entirely wrong on this but that is just what i have experienced on my systems.  Since it is a scratch drive I would experiment and try both drives and see which one does better.

[dmonterisi]

thanks for the suggestions.  fozzy, that makes sense.  I'm actually not too concerned about backing up every night, i just want to have a backup of the root partition in case the thing fails since everything in this computer is acting funky.  i have norton ghost2004 so i was going to use that once i'm all up and running.

[fozzy]

thanks for the suggestions.  fozzy, that makes sense.  I'm actually not too concerned about backing up every night, i just want to have a backup of the root partition in case the thing fails since everything in this computer is acting funky.  i have norton ghost2004 so i was going to use that once i'm all up and running.

In practice i would ghost before and after you make any changes so you can roll back to the last known good image. 

[dmonterisi]

thanks for the help fozzy...T to ya.