Adding a 2nd Hard Drive ???

RobRockTheHouse wrote on 2/27/2002, 7:39 PM
I have a simple question. Right now, I have a PIII,750Mhz,512Ram with a Western Digital 60G Hd running Win2k. The hard drive is running under a fat32 and I wanted to convert to NTSC for uninterupted recording of dv files but I CANNOT RISK LOSING ALL MY DATA at this time. Now question is, If I purchase a second HD and dedicate it solely for recording and have it formatted to NTSC so I wont have the 4Gig limitation, will I have any problems? Is that possible? Can I keep the VV3 on HD#1 and record on HD #2? Will rendering be affected at all?

I know these are simple questions for you guys but im rather new to this.

Any response will be appreciated.

Robert

Comments

Control_Z wrote on 2/27/2002, 8:17 PM
You shouldn't convert to NTFS - it forces a cluster size that's too small and affects performance. Always try to format new with 4K clusters (it's the default when you format).

You should be okay as long as you don't try to put any temp files or anything on the fat32 drive. But what a waste. I'd take the opportunity to install a fresh WinXP on the new drive and format the old one to NTFS when you're sure you don't need anything else from it.
FadeToBlack wrote on 2/27/2002, 9:10 PM
Chienworks wrote on 2/27/2002, 9:58 PM
Actually for substantially huge files, there is a demonstrable theoretical performance increase by using larger clusters. More data can be written to/read from the drive with less head movement (especially moving the head to the directory and back) with larger clusters. If most of your files are in the GB range, then cluster sizes of multi-megabytes would even be in order. Of course, that assumes the OS allows that. However, that being said, it probably wouldn't make any noticeable difference since the drives runs faster than the data streams than we're working with anyway.

Now, where was i going with this? Or was i just doing another one of my typical middle of the night rambles? Oh yes ... to the original question:

If your only concern is the 4GB file size limitation, then it's not as big a concern as you might think. Sonic Foundry's newer video capture/print to tape tools will automatically and seemlessly split the capture into 4GB sections and join them back into output files without even skipping a frame. It's not worth spending money on a new drive if that's the only thing you're worried about. But, if you want more space or if you want to keep your media files on a separate drive, then you have a valid reason to get another drive.
Control_Z wrote on 2/27/2002, 11:30 PM
I'm no disk expert, but this wisdom has been on the net since the early days of Win2k when the disks started getting bigger. Originally it was just a problem with the FAT having to grow to absurd sizes to map out the huge number of small 512 byte clusters.

Or something.

Here's a link:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/ntfs/implConv-c.html
>NTFS partitions that are converted from FAT partitions under Windows NT are assigned a cluster size of 512 bytes, which may reduce performance compared to larger cluster sizes that are the default for new NTFS partitions. ...

And yes, in theory for a dedicated video disk even larger clusters can be faster (if more wasteful). So far nobody's seen any serious real-world improvements though. Easy enough to test when you format between your next projects.