HD partition for video

wrrn wrote on 2/28/2004, 4:48 PM

Hi -

I just purchased a 200GB Maxtor as a secondary HD. Primary HD is for OS/boot.

I want to partition it into 3 areas:
4GB for windows paging/cache
20GB for misc storage
~175GB for dedicated video capture & rendering

Does this make technical sense? Are there drawbacks to partitioning. Maybe I should just leave it as a 200GB drive. What do you think?

thanks
warren

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 2/28/2004, 5:20 PM

I'd leave it as a 200 gig drive and just simply use folders for your organization.

TVCmike wrote on 2/28/2004, 8:31 PM

You should use your capture drive only to capture video. Leave your Windows swap on your OS hard drive. That's what it's there for. If you use your capture drive as a swap, you might have interruptions during capture. Usually DV is not that bad because of its low data rate, but you still risk dropping frames or having other nasty things happen.

About the only other use for it that I'd recommend is to render your final project to it, be it DV AVI or MPEG-2 for DVD. Then clear it out completely once you're done your final project. That includes permanent deletion if you have something like Norton Recycle Bin.

wrrn wrote on 2/29/2004, 12:13 AM

TVC - Would you suggest not placing the windows swap on the render HD, even if the swap file is in its own (small) partition?

wrrn

Cheesehole wrote on 2/29/2004, 12:25 AM

If your swap file is on the same physical drive (doesn't matter what partition) that your render drive is on, there may be some contention there. It depends if you like to do other stuff on your system while capturing. Safest bet is to keep it on the OS drive.

RBartlett wrote on 2/29/2004, 1:54 AM

Microsoft partitions, or rather logical separate/extension partitions on physical drives cause an unnecessary overhead.
Whenever you need something from the extended partition, there is access to the primary partition aswell. Although it is possible to have more than one primary, Microsoft (AFAIK) don't recognise this possibility, so it is a trick that OS boot selectors use.

There is value in having temp/render-cache/plug=ins on separate storage. Just less benefit with DV being quite low in resource requirements (these days).

A dedicated drive for applications buys more as you probably access different applications more than you render or use virtual memory.

OS - 1st drive
Apps - 2nd drive
camera1 video - 3rd drive
optional extra camera layer and stills/generated media - 4th drive
DVD target render - 5th drive
Sony Cache - 6th drive
virtual memory/swap file - 7th drive
ghost images - 8th drive
DVD writer - 9th device
Internet based machine backup service - 10th device letter!

Yet just having the 1st and the 3rd drive is perfectly adequate.

wrrn wrote on 2/29/2004, 9:58 AM

Thanks for the clarification
wrrn