Any benefit in partitioning harddrive?

darcy wrote on 12/11/2001, 8:01 AM

Look this might be a dumb question, but if I were to partition my harddrive and run VV, the OS etc. on one partition and DV files from another, would there be any performance benefit, in the same sense that having two separate physical harddrives gives one?

Any thoughts would be much appreciated

Comments

FrankM wrote on 4/26/2002, 11:20 AM

I have the same question as asked above.

Would partitioning help?

Thanks

dcrandall wrote on 4/26/2002, 11:25 AM

If at all possible a seperate hard drive should be used for your video files. If a second drive is not an option, then you should partition the disk. With a partitioned disk you should not have the defrag problems associated with a single partitioned drive.

Chienworks wrote on 4/26/2002, 11:46 AM

Partitioning will help your perfomance, but very slightly. Fragmentation of the drive really isn't much of a performance problem anymore. A 7200RPM ATA/100 drive can access individual sectors at random from a fragmented drive faster than a DV data stream, so a lack of fragmentation isn't going to help much. The biggest difficulty i've had with partitioning is that i always seem to run out of room on one of the partitions and still have lots of room on another. This causes me more angst and frustration than fragmentation does.

The true performance gain from separate drives comes from the fact that Windows occasionally needs to access various system information, and if it does this from the same drive then it interrupts the other accesses in progress on that drive. Partitioning won't help this. Ideally the media drive should also be on it's own IDE port.

BillyBoy wrote on 4/26/2002, 6:21 PM

Partitioning a hard drive is like slicing a pizza into smaller pieces. You won't increase the size or improve the quality. Ditto for hard drives. Much better to have a seperate drive, best if off a seperate IDE controller or even a firewire. Going that route will give some performance gain. That all said it still makes sense to partition your hard drive IF you have one of the larger ones, like anything over 30GB. One reason is if you don't then doing a defragementing is something you'll probably put off time again until you drive is totally scrambled because of time involved to defrag it. Many think it makes sense to have a seperate partition just for your operating system, another for your applications, still one more for your data files, some even set up a sperate one for the Swap or Paging file. If you do video editing seriously, then set up a SEPERATE drive for that task on top of all that.

About Fragmentation. It should be part of your routine house cleaning tasks. While faster drives can access badly fragemented files the extra strain on both the hardware and your operating system isn't good. If you burn CD's, having a seperate partition just for that purpose makes sense. Make a partition of about 800MB so you have some wiggle room and DO defrag prior to burning.

In my experience for video editing/rendering/capturing the biggest performance gains come in the following order:

1. faster CPU (major improvement) (dual CPU only minor gain)
2. seperate, freshly defragged, 7200 RPM Ultra 100-133 drive
3. faster memory (DDR) Note: extra memory beyond a certain point, doesen't help
4. proper sized Swap or Paging file depending on OS. Too large just as bad as too small.

Type of video card has trivial if any effect. Doing multitaking does NOT have a serious impact IF you have a true multitasking OS (like XP) and a "fast" CPU like 1500+ Mhz. I frequently burn CD's and or surf the web or work on a spreadsheet or Word document while Vegas Video is rendering out a file. While VV3 will take as much memory as it can, that don't mean it can't/won't share so you don't have to tie up your PC while rendering. If rendering time is important to you, seriously consider using a dedicated PC just for rendering.