Improving disk performance

[stustunz]

go do some reading on ahci
you will find its a waste of time

In the real world it doesnt change much so the effort you are putting into will show very little real gain
as long as you are using a separate drive to record onto you will have no problems

[keith_leitch]

Before I start, I just want to run the configuration past pBS and others. After all, this is a thread about disk performance.

I have decided against a RAID configuration for two reasons: 1) I can really only support three drives (physically and electronically) and wish to use all three. 2) Horror stories about having to have exactly the same drive and RAID controller in case of a failure. (Those stories don't make sense to me, but I don't want to take even the slightest risk that they might be true).

After my trip to the computer store, I now have my original 750GB videos drive, a new 1TB internal and a 1.5TB external (USB) drive, both Seagate, as well as some "bits". My computer is now equipped with more fans than Tom Jones. Too bad it no longer entertains like he does.

Anyway. I had wanted to use a small drive for my system (easy backups, etc.) but I just couldn't live with the price difference; I am too cheap. I do have six 7200rpm 80GB drives from the school where I teach, but is it unwise to use drives that have been in daily classrooms for anything important?

I think I am therefore going to do the following:

Partition EITHER my existing 750GB drive OR my new 1TB drive to house the system in one partition, and fairly "static" data (photos, downloaded video, etc.) in another. I would prefer the slightly smaller 750GB drive for the system, but I have been using it for a year for TV recordings. Opinion? I will also leave a partition to use for other purposes; for example, NTFS links.

I would then use the other large drive for most of my TV recordings (other than, possibly, those using NTFS links).

I can still use an old 80GB drive as the location of the "Live TV" buffer, as literally nothing is lost if the drive fails (and I would have another drive to put in its place).

Concerns: is sharing 600+GB of data with a system partition an unwise move? Am I just asking to lose both? Of course, backing up the data on a schedule is not a problem, but can I "ghost" a partition that is part of a larger drive? I am also determined to find a way to "ghost" a drive unattended, because as soon as I have to think about something, I stop doing it.

Related to this: should I be reconsidering using a smaller drive for the system, even though they are a rip-off?

Finally: Should I be purchasing another large drive instead of using an 80GB for ANY purpose?

Edit: Although I would prefer to have my programs (GBPVR and online TV streamers) in a separate paritition, they have been on "C" drive a long time, and I have a million batch files referencing them by location. I would prefer not to change those files; but should I reconsider the importance of a separate partition for programs?

[keith_leitch]

I have heard everything from "don't use it with video" to "make sure it's 1.5X your memory size. I must say that I am convinced I once had a system crash when the swap file was invoked while I was watching a video. However, with WinXP32 using only 3.x gig, do I really have the option to turn it off?

[Reddwarf]

Turning off the swapping is a risky buisness, if windows for some reason should run out of physical memory it has no emergenxy exit. So my advice is to have a fixed size 1.5x memory swapfile.

As for those claiming that raid is unreliable: I have 3 computers now running for more that a year with raid dirves (with windows itself on), and has NEVER har any problems with that!

With regards to AHCI, Stustunz is right, you don't gain any significant speed improvment.

[keith_leitch]

I have 3 computers now running for more that a year with raid dirves (with windows itself on), and has NEVER har any problems with that!

I appreciate that you've had postive experience with RAID. I have a very close friend who speaks just as highly of the technique. After all of the problems I've had, though, combined with horror stories from others, I'm just not in the mood to experiment any more than I have to. I will put in the work instead to find a TRUE imaging program that I can run as a scheduled task.

(Still mad at Bill Gates).

[Reddwarf]

(Still mad at Bill Gates).

We can agree on that

What you do with your system is of cource entierly up to you, I'm just saying don't beleive all the horror stories you hear. In the end, I think it's all about doing a proper job when you set up things.

[LewE]

After my trip to the computer store, I now have my original 750GB videos drive, a new 1TB internal and a 1.5TB external (USB) drive, both Seagate, as well as some "bits". My computer is now equipped with more fans than Tom Jones. Too bad it no longer entertains like he does.

Anyway. I had wanted to use a small drive for my system (easy backups, etc.) but I just couldn't live with the price difference; I am too cheap. I do have six 7200rpm 80GB drives from the school where I teach, but is it unwise to use drives that have been in daily classrooms for anything important?

I think I am therefore going to do the following:

Partition EITHER my existing 750GB drive OR my new 1TB drive to house the system in one partition, and fairly "static" data (photos, downloaded video, etc.) in another. I would prefer the slightly smaller 750GB drive for the system, but I have been using it for a year for TV recordings. Opinion? I will also leave a partition to use for other purposes; for example, NTFS links

I can tell you what I did on my system (Windows 7 x64 with a quad core processor). I came at it from a different perspective than you did. While you are concerned about backup, my concern was fragmentation.

I have two physical disks in my machine: a 750GB and 1TB disk. They are newer SATA 3GB/sec drives so performance, even with a single physical drive being divided into multiple partitions is not a problem.

I have the 750GB disk partitioned into 3 partitions. I am still tweaking the sizes but their use is:

C: Drive-- the Windows system disk.

D: Drive-- I am putting files on this disk that, if they were on the c: drive tend to get horribly fragmented each day. Two things related to GBPVR that I keep here are the XMLTV and UltraXMLTVEnhancer directories. The C: drive tends to have many small empty spaces in it during its normal use and the large files like xmltv.xml tend to be put into a lot of these holes and end up in hundreds of fragments. I can easily do a complete defrag on this drive each night and it takes almost no time at all. When these files were on the C: Drive, they would end up in hundreds of fragments each time the EPG was updated and defragging the c: drive takes a lot longer. I plan to move my Thunderbird email files to this drive also since I have kept emails from the past ten years and the mailboxes are quite large and suffer from heavy fragmentation. I do a nightly defrag (PerfectDisk 10) with Smart Placement on this partition.

E: Drive-- This is the largest partition (about 500GB) of the first physical drive and I use it for photos, MP3s, itunes, and videos that I've taken with my camera and I edit with video editing software. I defrag this partition on demand rather than daily.

F: Drive-- This is the second physical drive and it is a single 1TB partition used solely to store GBPVR recordings. I do a daily defrag on this partition with it just defragging the fragmented files. It doesn't touch the files that are already defragmented (all the ones that were recorded before the past day) so it doens't end up moving around huge numbers of GB of files each night. I figure that this puts less wear and tare on the drive than a fulll optimizing dfrag each night would. This works well because most of the files (except those related to Comskip processing) are of the size of a GB or more and the empty spots once the files are deleted are amenable to new recordings being stored over them.

Before you ask about the D: drive not being the removable media drive, I changed assignments so the G: drive is my CD/DVD drive.

I have two USB drives from my previous computer (250GB and 500GB) which I use to back up my files from the internal disks.

The 750GB drive I use for the C:, D: and E: drives has enough extra space that I can later add a partition for dual booting if I get to the point of wanting to try out another operating system, e.g. Linux or Windows 7's successor.

[keith_leitch]

I can tell you what I did on my system

Thanks for this information. It sounds a lot like what I am planning. I only have three real concerns: 1) With Windows on the same physical drive as other data, am I putting my photos, etc. at greater risk? 2) Will I be able to ghost a bootable Windows image from a partition rather than a drive, and, 3) Is my 750G drive up to the task after a year of recording TV?

Also, I was hoping to give pBS' implementation of NTSF links a try.

[carpeVideo]

yep, gotta re-install if going to ahci...if you want the benefits on the data drives, those too...
have to backup and reformat them in ahci mode...
it *should/ be able to read the data disks wo/reformat, but they won't get the benefits of ahci.
the data drives are the ones that need the benefits for multi-recording...
[not that the windows drive wouldn't benefit]

and be careful about raid..you can end up losing everything if you don't know what you're doing..
i've seen too many fail miserably and i won't trust a raid setup unless i do a test fail/restore beforehand..
raid can get rather complicated..
twice the speed with twice the risk of data loss, despite it's mirroring nature..
[only raid 5/10 offer real speed without risk, requiring 5 or more drives...]

You do not always need to reinstall to go to ahci - I did it on two of my machines with no issues. For Win7 its fairly easy for XP it depends :
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=444831

Whether or not you get an appreciable performance issues is questionable, people do argue over that one and graphs I have seen show RAID will give you a much better increase.

Also if your biggest issue is comskip - why not a) switch it to low cpu usage and b) post process in the middle of the night, not right after the recording.

[pBS]

you can image a partition alone with ghost, or a drive..it can be scripted to be auto...

keep windows on separate partition is a must..separate drive not so important..

i think about it in terms of what will be happening same time, whatever is likely to get high usage at same time should be placed on separate drives for the multichannel benefits..
[tvbuffer, main recordings, and ntfs link dest. all on separate drives]

for protection and backups, win on separate partition, swap separate part., gbpvr on separate part..what disk not so important for these...tho you want to keep them from interfering with data drives activity...
so main record drv not good for windows as win will have some activity..
i would use an 80g drv for windows, and tvbuffer partitions..buffer is used less than rec., and windows doesn't need a whole lot of disk while watching buffer..
[all separate partitions]
gbpvr could go on win drive as well in it's own partition...or any drive really as it doesn't use much disk...only needs about 2 gig..can be backed up by mere copy,doesnt need imaging..

for comskip you can set it to not do livetv, which helps,launch with -n and it'll 'play nice' and not use too much resources...or simply put it in postproc. to lessen fragmenting.
[to run after recording finishes]

basically think of your most taxing scenario, then arrange disks so that they all share the load...

[for me, at most i have 3 shows recording, with 3 comskips, spread over 3 drives..
[ntfs links can utilize as many drives as you wish]

and i agree. ahci is mostly about seeking...but when recording multiples to one drive, it does help...[because of the fragmentation]
tho maybe only on playback...