Reconfiguring PC for Music

[edmann]

Greetings All -

today I will begin to reconfigure my PC for music

currently: ASUS A7V333/512 MB (256X2) 333 Mhz DDR /AMD Athlon XP 1800 + w/(2) 80 GB IBM Deskstar 120 GXP ATA 100 HD's RAIDed together

my idea is to unRAID the system and reconfigure as follows:

*add Western Digital Caviar 40 GB HD for OS + ?
* unRAID the (2) 80 GB Deskstars - use for audio + ?
* add (1) 512 MB stick DDR, (it is same manufacturer and type)

What I am wondering is:

*What would be the best format and partition design for the 40 GB OS drive? It is important is to have C:\ be of a size that can be Norton GHOST written, etc.

* same question for the (2) 80 GB Deskstars (for audio etc) - how many partitions and what size?

all comments welcome, and

thanks very much in advance!

Ed

[Zenith]

well i would not suggest partitioning the audio drives.. mainly cause it makes the drives heads work WAY more than they should and if they have to go from one partition to the other then the seek time of the drives is going to go up alot,.. so its not worth it at all to partition the audio drives

[edmann]

wow Zenith! I was not ready for that one...

but I am coming from the mac side of things so perhaps I am misinformed, as follows:

*in the mac - with big partitions - I experienced long start times when intitiating record, and when those partitions were brought down to about 7 GB then the responsiveness entered real-world usefulness. Not so in XP?


* if one were not to cross partitons within a given project - would the problem that you descrine not be an issue?

One 80 GB partition....hmmmm. Well I am here to learn so thank you and I do sincerely appreciate all input.

thanks again

Ed

[Zenith]

true if you were to to cross a partition it would not be an issue yes.. so you would need the program, your plugis and all your files to be on the one partition... the time where this becomes the biggest problem is really when you have 2 audio files across a partition.. then your going to be seeking back and forth. the best reason to partition is to keep files from becoming fragmented.. but if you do a defragment often enough, there really is no large benefit.

and ya the reason that the smaller partition became better for you was that the audio files would be closer to the program files on the disk, so less seek time.