Configuration

[jsteele]

I'm considering a reconfiguration of my system. Right now everything lives on a single 160GB 5400PRM IDE drive.

I've now got a new 250GB SATA drive and am considering rearranging things so that:

- the XP system, GBPVR and its databases, system utilities etc are on the current 160GB IDE (much larger than needed but its already there.)
- add the SATA drive and all the video, music, etc., libraries, record buffer space, etc., move to it;
- adding a small IDE drive (I have a spare 40GB on hand) and using that for the swapfile, logfiles, etc. to keep the swap space off the system spindle.

Any thoughts?

[kayleigh]

A SATA drive would definitely improve video & audio performance. The swap being on a totally different drive also improves performance - I create a static-sized swap file about 2.5x the physical memory size on a separate drive and one equal to the physical memory size on the OS partition/drive. (Windows needs this to do a physical dump of memory in case it does a blue screen. Static swap files prevent fragmenting the swap file and, again, improves performance.) Just follow Sub's suggestion about partitioning the SATA drive at 64k for the allocation unit size to minimize fragmenting the recording drive.

[jsteele]

Thanks.

I ususally set the swap as a fixed multiple of real memory, I've found this to improve things in swap intensive situations. I'll pay attention to the 64K allocation too.