I am not aware of any such requirements with Vegas, but a lot of Windows software, including Windows, will stuff things on the C drive, and only the C drive. With the cost of drives coming down, dedicating an entire drive as C is a good idea.

I do not know why you would want to partition a drive into multiple Windows drives today, there is no reason and it adds more problems (reducing the size of your C drive) than it solves. If you need to split the drives, just get another drive. It is almost cheaper to buy a new drive than it is to partition an existing one, even if you assume your time is worth minimum salary.

The main reason you partition drives today is to install additional operating systems such as Linux, and even that makes less sense now that we have VMWare.

If you already have partitioning software, then splitting a hard drive is a trivial matter. It seems a bit of overkill to have a 500GB drive with just 20GB of OS and apps installed on it. But with a utility such as PartitionMagic and 5 minutes, you can keep a 40GB C drive and get a new 460GB D drive.

What's the point? For one thing, I like to do an image backup on a fairly regular basis, since I suffer from terminal curiosity and trash my system from time to time. Faster to restore 20GB of data than 500GB. But to each his own.

I have dual boot XP/Vista on the same physical drive and I have set it up so that when XP is running, it sees itself as being on C drive and Vista is on J drive. But when Vista is running it will in turn see itself as being on C drive and XP is on J. My personal data is on D drive (including my mail folder) and both OS's see it as D drive and both OS's treat the data on that drive as if it was its own... including the mail folder. When I boot vista, my mail folder looks EXACTLY the same as it would as if I booted on XP. Both OS's also see my rendering drive as E drive and it is treated the same by both OS's. This is also true for my project drive.

So yes... what you are asking is entirely possible.... but regardless to what drive you put your various OS's on though, you do have to install all your programs twice... once for each OS. This means that the way have Vegas set up on one OS won't necessarily be the same way as in the other OS (unless of course you set them up to match manually)

Thanks.
JJK

> What's the point? For one thing, I like to do an image backup <

Yes, and there's another good reason to use partitions - to segregate data that fragments often with data that never fragments. I have a 20 GB C: partition for the reason you state (image backup), and also separate partitions for temporary internet files and email which fragment often, plus two others for synth samples and downloaded software that never fragments. It's a LOT faster to defragment a 20 GB partition (5-20 minutes) than an entire 200-500 GB drive that takes all night!

--Ethan

I have been partitioning my first drive for several years - Usually into 3. My current 160GB drive is set with a C: 25GB OS partition, D: 15GB programs partition, and the E: partition is my Documents, web sites I develop and still images I have acquired over the years. All audio loops and cinescore themes are on a 200GB F: drive and all my video is done on a 2x160GB Raid 0. Finally I have a 160GB USB drive for downloads and backup and another 320GB firewire/esata drive for video backup.

My Dell D400 laptop is done in a similar fashion, albeit with smaller partitions reflecting the HD size which is only 60GB. OS and programs are installed on the C: partition and all data is stored on the D: partition. Video editing is done with a new WD 250GB laptop drive in a firewire enclosure and audio is on a 60GB firewire drive by the same company as the 250GB drive..

This setup really does make it easier to reinstall as the reformat and install takes much less time. Never had a single issue doing it this way and plan on continuing this practice.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt

But why defrag at all? It doesn't help anything and just adds a lot of extra unnecessary wear & tear on the drive.

My personal experience indicates that I DO experience better perfomance when my drives are defragged.

I'm sure there is some sort of published information that states otherwise, and I tried without defragging my drives for 2 weeks - I experienced a noticeable performance hit and the performance issues were only resolved with a complete defrag. It was almost frustratingly slow - to the point of becoming upset at the increased time it took to render a simple project. I kept careful notes on what was done and the length of time it took to render. I then defragged and rebooted to clear all settings - I saw a 25% performance boost - So I'm not sure where the notion comes from stating defragging isn't needed.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt

Yea - I do notice defrag performance gains too - but mainly on system drive files.
I don't defrag audio/video files when working on a project, as they are recorded close together and thus physically nearer each other on the disc.

I also partition OS disc, as I have VIsta32 on one partition, Vista64 on another partition, and a junk area on a third partition. Audio/videos/backup drives are not partitioned.

"rebooted to clear all settings"

I'd bet that your performance gains came entirely from the reboot. Windows is bad at managing memory. After it's been running for a while you've probably lost some usable RAM and are hitting swap a lot. Rebooting clears that right up.

The defragging people have stopped publishing information ages ago since it was showing how little defragging accomplished. There have been a few reports in these forums of people trying it under controlled conditions and getting no measurable gain at all.

No one seems to have hit on the fact that what happens when there is an unrecoverable crash. Drive C may have to be reformatted to re-install o/s. If all your valuable data is on the same drive - then what?

"No one seems to have hit on the fact that what happens when there is an unrecoverable crash. Drive C may have to be reformatted to re-install o/s. If all your valuable data is on the same drive - then what?"
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As I said above, my OS's are on the same drive. This is done so that doing disk images become quite easy. The problem with disk imaging though is that any data you have gained after the last disk image gets lost. This is one of the BIG reasons my data is kept on a separate drive which is straight copied to an external drive about once or twice a month for back up purposes.

With 4GB RAM PC800 RAM and x64XP Pro - Running out of memory? Pagefile on seperate dedicated drive...

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt

Chienworks:

Diskeeper is one program that shows just how much fragmenting is hurting. When you have it analyze a partition, it shows a bar chart showing two bars--how long it would take to read all files if they weren't fragmented, and how long it currently takes. Granted, the difference isn't that much, but it's there.

Just now, out of curiosity, I ran my copy of Diskeeper10 on my C drive. After chugging away for a few minutes, it says my current time to read all files on the C drive is about 112 minutes, while the read time if they were all defragged is 6% lower, about 105 minutes. A second bar chart says the current read time for all fragged files is 23 minutes, which would drop to 16 minutes if they were defragged.

So according to these guys, it makes a difference. I'm running XPpro on NTFS.