Optimum Hard-drive configuration for recording

[VirtualSamana]

I recently bought a new computer with a 20 gig HD. I also have a 4 gig HD that I cannabalized from my old system. I would like to use my computer for surfing the web/playing games/letting my girl friend use it (danger!) as well as recording music.

Is it advisable that I set up a dual boot system (both OS's Win98)

If so:

is there a cheaper way to do this than buying software (i.e. partition magic?)

How many partitions? Is it better to keep your music software in one partition and your tracks/mixdowns/wav files/etc. on another (I guess one obvious advantage to this would be ease of backing up)? Is it personal preference or is there a tried and true HomeRecording.com method?

I would ideally like to set aside 15 megs for recording software and recording data and 9 megs for piss around computer use. This means the OS that I will be using for general computer use will be using 2 drives (the whole 4 megs of my old drive and 5 megs of my new drive.) The new drive is faster than the old one(100 ATA/7200 vs 33/5200) Is this a conflict? I don't really care about speed for the OS for general computer use but I obviously do care about speed for recording.

Thanks

 

[JerryD]

Hmmm.

Dual boot? Way too much work and also too much rebooting.
I would try to find a copy of WIN2K. It has the stability of NT
and the plug n play of Windows 98. WIN2k fixes problems in both NT and Win98.

Partition?
I think the idea is that the applications and O/S use one drive and the songs are copied onto a data drive. This way performance would be increased. Just creating a partition on the same drive is missing the whole point I think.

You should use a small drive like 4gig for the operating system and applications and a larger one, like 20gig, for data. The reason the data drive is bigger is because this one is changing more where your apps and O/S don't change in size much.

 

[Rocker151]

Win2k isn't compatible with everything

Before you haul off and install Windows 2000, make sure your audio hardware has WIN2K drivers. While they did upgrade the multimedia capability in WIN2K, it is NOT the same as Win 9x/Me.

A number of popular audio cards are NOT supported in WIN2K, as well as several popular software applications, like Logic Audio and Cubasis.

 

[Rocker151]

Actually, a second partition on the same drive can help with performance a little because the file system for your audio will be seperate from the rest of your system. For example, if you have everything on C: and haven't run a defrag lately, the file fragmentation will degrade read/write performance. Putting all the audio on a seperate partition will increase your chances that the operating system will keep the files in one contiguous piece, rather than splitting it up to fill empty spaces all over the drive.

IMHO, I'd forget the 4GB drive. It's probably much slower than your 20GB. If you run the OS off it, overall system performance will suffer. Whatever you do, remember to leave a couple hundred MB free on the Windows partition at all times for the Windows swap file. Too little swap space is a crash waiting to happen, especially if you're moving a ton of data around.