Please help me get the right configuration with new hard drive

Status
Not open for further replies.
I currently have a 30 Gig drive with XP Pro. All as one partition. I have just purchased an 80 Gig drive and an DVD recorder. I plan to do some video editing and DVD burning so I will need plenty of space and processing power. How should I configure my setup with the new hardware I have now?

I have the following hard drives:

Seagate ST330640A
30 GB
Ultra ATA/66
7200 RPM
8.2 ms average access (read)
2 MB buffer
E-IDE/ATAPI interface

Western Digital WD800JB
80 GB
Ultra ATA/100
7200 RPM
8.9 ms average access (read)
2 MB buffer
E-IDE/ATAPI interface

And I have a Memorex 32023282 dual format DVD recorder.
Oh and I have 512MB or RAM.

How should I configure my drives? Which drive to use for my XP Pro installation? Do I need a swap file partition? Do I need a partition on each hard drive to split my swap file up between the two drives? Which drive do I place my movie files on that I'll be burning to DVD? Which controllers do each drive need to be placed on?

Is this a good idea?
Partition the 80 GB as follows:
C: 4 GB for OS installation (XP Pro)
Z: 1 GB for swap file
D: Remaining space for data (documents, videos, music, etc.)

Partition the 30 GB as follows:
Y: 1 GB for swap file
E: Remaining space for data (documents, videos, music, etc.)

Slit my swap file up between the two physical drives.

Should I place my videos in progress for editing on the D: (80 GB drive, OS) drive and archive them on E: (30 GB drive) after I burn them to DVD? Or vice versa?
 
I'd put the 80 gig as primary master on the other channel, then capture my video to that one, do all my rendering and have the the output saved to the 30 gig prior to burning
 
I think it would be better to install the (faster ATA100) 80GB as Master on its own on the first IDE. Partition 10/70 GB, 10 for XP and stuff. Do all your video-editing on the 70GB partition. Store finished data on the 30GB Seagate.
Put the DVD as Master and the 30GB as Slave on second IDE.
You should also buy another 512MB RAM.
Set the pagefile as a fixed file of 20MB on the 10GB partition, and have the rest of the pagefile as fixed 750MB with 512MB memory, or 1500MB with 1GB memory, placed at the start of the 30GB drive. Put it there before you copy anything onto that 30GB drive, that way it will never become fragmented.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back