best HD format/partition approach for recording

[Mithrandir]

Hey folks,
I have 2 7200 rpm drives on my computer, adequate sized. Is there a best way to partition the drives so as to minimize crashes and other problems when recording? From what I've read here so far, I get the impression that its best to dedicate one drive to applications and one to the recorded material. Is it better to keep the OS (Win98se for me) in its own partition and other applications on the extended partition, or just create one partition on each drive?
Any info or advice welcomed!

[Vas]

Personally, I'd just put win98, and all your applications on one drive, and then have all your audio on the other. Just make sure both drives are on the same IDE channel, and keep your CDROM/DVD separately on the other IDE channel. I can't see that creating a separate partition for windows is going to make any difference...

[P.Sound]

Originally posted by Vas
Just make sure both drives are on the same IDE channel, and keep your CDROM/DVD separately on the other IDE channel.

Actually, you want your "AUDIO" drive to be on its own separate channel and nothing on it as a "SLAVE" if at all possible.

program - Primary IDE Channel Master CD-R/RW - Primary Slave Audio - Secondary Master 2nd cd or 3rd HD - Secondary SLAVE

There is no advantage to having multiple partitions on one drive for programs other than and increased speed for defragmenting, etc. or a desire to install a boot management program like Partition Magic and have several instances of one or more operating systems.

Ther is an advantage to having multiple partitions on the "AUDIO" drive becasue it allows you to quickly backup or make safe the audio project by copying or moving files to another partition during the work of a given project. It does not actually make the data safe from harware failure. But it can speed up the performance of the disk, becasue the heads are staying confined to a smaller area. For example, its common to make the first partition your work area becasue its tyoically the fastest portion of the disk. Do not make this too small though or during the record process, it will fragment the files, whereas with space you won't typically have that problem.

[Dr_Electronic]

I've noticed some differing advice on this topic and none of it is quite on the money and none adresses the best file system to format the drives in. First, Vas is right on the hard drive/CD-Rom IDE channel layout. See this article on Tomshardware if you want more info: http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/97q3/970728/hdd-04.html

Also, if you want to speed things up, make a small partition on your primary drive, around 500 Mb to 1Gb, and format it FAT (not FAT-32). Go into your virtual memory settings and tell the OS that you want to specify virtual memory manualy and make this partition the place for the swap file. Make your swap file for about the whole size of the partition and make Min and Max size the same amount. I would normally suggest that you make this partition on the second drive, but that's where you're going to be writing audio files so best to put the swap on the primary drive.

Now, about the file system for your Audio drive, you should format that drive (or the primary partition of that drive if you have more than one) FAT. Although you will not get quite the storage capacity out of the drive this way, it will read and write better with less chance of errors and it's a little faster to optimize (defrag) which I suggest you do after much recording and moving of files. Allowing your drive to write contigous files instead of jumping around on a fragmented drive can make a huge difference in performance.

Hope this helps.

[P.Sound]

Actully, I respectfully disagree. While I respect many of the things Tomshardware has to say, you have to use some logic in apply the advice.

These are not gaming machines being built here, they are DAW's, and the needs are quite different. I'm not going to get into huge depth here, but where you put the CD is somewhat related to how you work. DAW, unlike games, requires constant streaming, uniterrupted streaming of data in large bloacks from the channel from which its connented. In most cases, these aren't MP3 compressed files. So If the CD is on the same channel, the data stream is interrupted much more often during the burn or read in the case of bring data off a CD to the DAW application. Now, if you are just using one hard drive, then I would agree that putting the CD on the Secondary Channel as the MASTER is proper.

RE: The so-called "swap file partition". It simply makes no difference, been there, done that, actually slowed things down and has one large disadvantage. If you change your memory quantity, you need to change partition size. It seems in theory to make sense, but in practicle use, it just doesn't for heavy memory intensive apps like DAW. One thing to keep in mind is that you really don't want the DAW app to use the swap file at all if possible? Keeping it small, or for that matter, letting WINDOWs manage the size, with a large amount of physical RAM will speed the process becasue there is nothing in the PC faster than physical RAM. I suppose if you undersize you RAM, then maybe this can help? But it just means you've not properly sized the RAM to begin with.

[swingset]

P.Sound, I see what you're saying. I have to admit I don't do much audio recording but I do do (that just doesnt' sound right) quite a bit of video work and I've found that the "standard" drive layout worked fine for me. Also, in this layout I have had measurably better performance when it comes time to burn my videos to VCDs. I work with as many as 15 or so video clips at a time along with audio tracks and effects and have had no problems.

At the moment, I don't use either of these schemes though... I have a striped RAID system of two 80gig drives and I have found that this has been the smoothest setup so far for my uses. The striped RAID is fast, has it's own seperate ATA133 controller (it came on my motherboard so I decided to use it) and with the cheap price of drives these days, seemed like the way to go. With a lot of very good and very inexpensive motherboards now supporting RAID, I would think it would be a good thing for the audio world... video artist have been using RAID arrays for quite some time though they were usually expensive SCSI setups that the home hobbiest couldn't afford. You'd better put it in another room though if you do any live recording because a case full of hard drives can make quite a racket, not to mention all the fans.

[Dr_Electronic]

Just to set the record straight, that last post was by me... not swingset... he had been using this computer and hadn't logged out before heading home (we work at the same place). Just think of all the naughty things I could have done in his name!!

[Mithrandir]

Thanks a bunch for the input, guys. I have to sit down and sift through this info and go back to THG for a read. I may be posting on this again . . . Right now I have spent all day struggling to find driveers for an old modem, so my brain is too mushy to read this stuff now. But when I do . . .
Thanks again!