HD partitioning vs. separate drives

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Polaris20

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I was wondering if anyone has tried just partitioning a drive into 2 separate drives, instead of buying 2 drives, one for OS and apps, the other for music.

I'd like to get a 120gig 7200rpm, then split it for OS and music. Would this work? I know you're supposed to have separate drives for music and everything else, and in theory this sounds like it'd work.
 
I know you're supposed to have separate drives for music and everything else
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Partitionning a single drive works just as well. I'm doing it and so are many other people on this BBS : one small partition (5-10 Gb) for OS and apps, and the rest for data (audio files).

The only advantage I can think of in having 2 separate drives is that it would make it easier to carry your projects around, as you can simply bring the data drive with you while leaving the OS drive in the PC
 
re:

I'd never have the need to carry the separate drive somewhere, as it's in a desktop computer, which would be a huge hassle to disassemble.

Thanks for the fast reply, jeez that was fast!!
 
2 separate drives on separate IDE channels (ribbons) would let you access data on both drives at the same time therefore speeding things up.

IDE can only access 1 drive on each IDE chain at a time. It is because one IRQ is only given to each channel, therefore if you have 2 drives on the same ribbon, one must wait for the other to finish communicatingwith the motherboard to perform its tasks.
 
you might WANT to carry a seperate drive someday. I did it just last week;)

2 drives is totally great if something goes WRONG with one. For instance... if a drive crashes pretty hard.. you may need to totally re-format the whole disk.. wiping out you partitions.. (though rare.)

Alos.. I keep a pretty constant backup briefcase of my essential C: drive stuff on my D: drive ( adress book.. bookmarks.. Mydocuments folder...) Thus, if either drive crashes.. Im back up and running pretty easily. Occasionally I backup the briefcase to a cd.

xoxo
 
I use 2 HD's but I have my primary partitioned with 2 OS's.
The 1st OS is all my day to day programs and internet garbage, etc. The 2nd OS is stripped down with nothing but my recording Apps. also disabled ethernet card, 16bit video max., SB, USB's, etc. This allows for a cleaner system with no confusion of files and unnecesary programs. It is optimized for audio.
My 2nd HD is for audio only. Both drives are WD 7200's.
A 20 or 40gig drive is pretty cheap now, so I recommend having 2.
 
Think for a moment how a hard drive is built (I used to work for a SCSI hard drive manufacturer in Boca Raton, so I used to talk with the engineers there...)

You've got a recording head on an arm - very similar in layout to a phonograph needle on a record player arm - moving back and forth rapidly to get over the correct tracks all over the disk.

Mechanical motion takes time... glacial, continental-drift time compared to everything else going on inside the computer. If you are streaming audio off of the outside partition of the disk and all of a sudden Windows demands attention and the arm has to swing to the inside tracks of the disk to do a little housekeeping, then swing out to the outside of the disk to stream a little more audio and then back in again to do a little housekeeping in the Window partition....

Can you see where this is going???? That's why the video guys... who have to stream a heck of a lot more info than our audio apps... all use RAIDs with multiple drives keeping multiple heads moving quickly over multiple platters (which is overkill for what we do....)

One thing that smaller data partitions DO do very well is keep your data organized over one small part of the disk platter so that the arm doesn't have to move very far as it goes from file-to-file. Speeds up defragging the partition, too.
 
re:

Thanks guys. I can see all of your points about mobility, and reliability.

I am merely a hobbyist, and I don't know anyone else who records on computers in my area, so the mobility factor doesn't matter. If it ever does, by then I'll have upgraded anyway.

THe backing up factor, in case anything were to go wrong with the one drive, doesn't really matter either, because I have my computer on a home network, with a DOS batch file backing up crucial files once daily.

Even if something happens, it's only home recording stuff, not life or death professional audio.
 
It may not be life o death, but it sure is a pain in the ass when you lose a drive.

Two reasons to have two drives, vs partions:

1) IDE controllers don't do a good job of reading and writing at the same time. For example, copyign from one partion to another. Two drives on two seperate controllers will work better.

2) I like a setup with one "system" drive for the OS and applications, and then a big fast "data" drive for holding data and recording to. The second drive can also be used to write an image of the system drive, using something like Ghost or Drive image. Write it in 650 meg chunks, put those on CDR, and you have a perfect backup solution in case the system dies. And then back up your music data files seperately.
 
HEY POLARIS, I'M SITTING HERE WITH JOE GLOVER AND I SAW YOUR QUESTION. HERE'E WHAT U SHOULD DO. GO AHEAD AND PART YOUR DRIVE , BUT DO NOT - I REPEAT DO NOT USE AUDIO FILES AND PROGRAMS ON THE SAME DRIVE! U WILL DEFINITELY CRASH YOUR SYSTEM. GET ANOTHER DRIVE FOR AUDIO INSTEAD. TRY USING 2 DIFFERENT OS(OPERATING SYSTEM) ON THE PARTED DRIVE INSTEAD. USE XP FOR OFFICE PROGS IN ONE OS, AND WINDOWS 98 FOR MUSIC PROGRAMS ON THE OTHER. REASON FOR 98 IS THAT IT'S MORE STABLE FOR MUSIC, AND CERTAIN MUSIC PROGS WILL NOT OPERATE ON THE XP SERIES. GO TO "PCWORLD.COM" TO GET THE INFO ON DOWNLOADING THE SOFTWARE THAT ALLOWS DUAL OPERATING SYSTEMS.
 
Caps lock stuck?

Having your audio files and your OS on the same drive will not cause your system to crash, though it's still a good idea to have your audio files on a seperate drive if you can afford that luxury. Also, XP works just fine for music work, and is significantly more stable than any Win9x OS. The only audio app I have that doesn't work in XP is X-Incarn, whose usefullness is questionable anyway.
 
Sorry Joe, but using programs and audio files on the same drive will NOT crash your system. Its just not the best way to arrange things.
 
I hear that on XP and 98, the user has the ability to turn the caps lock off.
Do I need to have 2 separate drives for that? Sorry, had to joke about that. =)
 
joeglover said:
TRY USING 2 DIFFERENT OS(OPERATING SYSTEM) ON THE PARTED DRIVE INSTEAD. USE XP FOR OFFICE PROGS IN ONE OS, AND WINDOWS 98 FOR MUSIC PROGRAMS ON THE OTHER. REASON FOR 98 IS THAT IT'S MORE STABLE FOR MUSIC, AND CERTAIN MUSIC PROGS WILL NOT OPERATE ON THE XP SERIES.
Click to expand...

Eh? Thats pretty ridiculous. Win98 more stable than XP? You gotta be kidding...

XP has been the best OS so far on my system. I've been using it since Thanksgiving. It is even faster than 2000 on my PII-400 with 512Mb of RAM.
 
brzilian said:


Eh? Thats pretty ridiculous. Win98 more stable than XP? You gotta be kidding...

XP has been the best OS so far on my system. I've been using it since Thanksgiving. It is even faster than 2000 on my PII-400 with 512Mb of RAM.
Click to expand...

I agree !!
 
I will say that I had one hell of a time getting XP to install properly, and never could get it to be stable on particular Athlon motherboard (see my prior post). But having now finally beaten it into submission on my PIII, it has been 100% crash free.
 
Hmm, it seems like you have payed no attention to TimOBriens post. What he explains is where the real problems come in. Doing a double partition on one drive can definately help the harddrive to run smoother while recording, but the heads still have to move for the windows programs. It is easier for the drive when it is double partitioned to keep the data organized, as in keeping all the windows data and the audio data in one group of clusters. However, you could easily experience dropouts running more than 12 tracks of 16/44.1 audio (maybe a little more tracks). Audio must be a continuelly stream for it to work properly. If there is a bunch of data streaming at once, then is all of a suddenly interrupted by a windows request, the stream will break, causing a drop out.

Of course you can get by with this, and so it is not required to have two drives. But this setup is highly recommended if you are doing it more seriously.

Yes mobility and safety is another reason for two drives, but usually not the most important reason.

As far as the Win98 vs. Win XP thing goin on here as well. It really mainly depends on your own hardware in your computer. The main factor between the two OS's is driver support. Yes, win2k and xp will run drivers more stabile then win98, but thats only if they are stabile drivers in the first place. If the company that makes your hardware makes good 98 drivers and sucky 2k drivers, then definately, 98 will be the more stabile OS. As far as blue screens and crashes, this is also another factor on your own personal hardware. Usually these blue screens and crashes come from incompatibility. Probably the biggest factor in incompatibility comes from the motherboard and or CPU.

So my opinion, is it is not far to call one OS more stabile than the other, win2k and xp most probably are the more stable and consistant OS's, but not for every system.

Darnold
 
With modern hardware,

This all is not as critical as it was a couple of years ago.

With UDMA 100 drives, processors pushing 2 GHZ, memory cheap enough for everyone to have half a gig or mor, and os's like XP, you can get by with one drive, one partition, and for most things you'll be fine. I run two drives, 3 partitions, but I have done everything on the same drive jusf for screwing around, and had no problems. It all depends on the rest of the hardware you are running.


Oh, on XP, I have found the most important thing to be to make sure you have the LATEST bios version you can get before you load. I have had several cases where it just wouldnt load, and either loading a new bios, or reseting the bios to default has solved the problem every time.
 
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