This page is about hard drives and partitions. If you already know all there is to know on the subject or if my recommendations - which are only slightly related to CD recording - are of no interest, please move on.
The current fashion in computer systems is to deliver them with a single, large drive formatted in a single partition. Simply put, that's a recipe for inefficiency and an invitation to poor practice. The first time you try to back up 40 GB or to search 20,000 files, you'll appreciate both factors - and if you decide to defrag that partition after some weeks of fragmentation, you'll be lucky to finish the job overnight.
Writing from one defragged drive to another is quick. The heads progress on each as quickly as they can and information is transferred at nearly the sustained rate of which the hardware is capable. Writing within one drive, even between two partitions, requires that the heads seek from each read sequence to the corresponding write. Seek time is very long compared with read and write times. For example, backing one partition up to another on a different drive is several times faster for me than backing it up to the same drive. Every time you move a large file - for example, to write the Undo for a WAV you're editing - you will see the difference.
There are three sorts of information stored on most computers:
Operating systems are getting close to a Gigabyte. Add in the utilities to support your hardware, the pagefile/swapfile (on the boot drive to handle error logs) and the like and you need a 2-GB C: partition. Some people want Gigabytes of application code, but for the most part they are simply holding applications they think they may want to consider starting to learn some day (when they'll be outdated, but who's counting?). Another way to bloat the applications partition is to throw in all the sample files and tutorials the publisher provides; just because the file is on the installation disc does not mean that it needs to be on your hard drive. If you look at the programs you use, you're likely to find that they, too, will fit into 2 GB with room to spare. (Of course, many applications use data only sparingly. Your accounting data, for example, logically stay with the programs that write them.)
Now for all those MP3s, WAVs, TIFs, JPGs, MOVs, AVIs, ... you absolutely have to have. That's cool and there's no reason not to have them accessible on your hard drive when storage is so inexpensive. The fact is that those files are not used the same way as your OS and apps. They are not searched for the same reasons and don't require the same sort of backup. Good practice says that when you've written some hundreds of MB since your last backup of those files, you write a CD-R with the new ones and mark the disc so you can find the files again. Logically, you make big - okay, BIG partitions for them. You don't back up those partitions, you back up their files. You don't search thousands of DLLs to find the MOV you want; you search the partition with a few dozen MOVs, AVIs and so on.
Since you're reading this primer, you are presumably also writing CDs. If your writing from a hard drive, you known that that partition should be defragged. In fact, the easy way to do it is to make one or two partitions of 1-2 GB each and to leave them empty as a rule. When it's time to write that disc, just put the source files into the empty partition - no defragging needed because the files don't fragment when you write them that way. Even if you have managed to fragment that storage, defragging such a drive is quick and sure.
At this writing, I have two, 20-GB EIDE drives on my system. Each has three partitions: two are FAT16 (2 GB) and one is NTFS - it could be FAT32 just as well. Drive 0 has C:, E: and G:. Drive 1 has D:, F: and H:. G and H hold current backups of D: and C: respectively and can be reached from a DOS boot floppy. C: is the boot partition with OS and such; D: is the application partition. G and H have plenty of space left to hold the files to write a CD. E: and F: are the work spaces. My downloads go into a dedicated folder there and are checked for viruses regularly. Audio and video files are held there while I'm working with them and while waiting to be backed up in logical chunks to CD-R. I put my TEMP folder there as well both to speed up file transfers and to be sure I won't run out of space. And by having two such partitions on different physical drives, most of my work with large files runs at high speed.
One footnote is worth adding, I hope. The documentation will assure you that storage efficiency goes up with FAT32 and NTFS. That is certainly true - but it doesn't matter. Today, you buy Megabytes of storage for a penny; how much is it worth to save a few tens of Kilobytes per application? Like backup software, partitioning for backup is very cheap insurance. I back up C: and D: at least once a week; it takes about ten minutes total and I can burn the CD-R copy when and if I wish. I don't back up the other partitions, but I do keep CD-R copies of the important files they contain and can rebuild either easily if needed. If I have a head crash on either drive, I can be back on line in half an hour with the full system by restoring what's needed from the other drive. (Admittedly, there can be a problem with installs since the last backup, but I can reinstall anything I put in over the past few days.)
Finally (at last!), if you buy the thoughts above and want to modify your configuration along similar lines, you will find PowerQuest's Partition Magic an easy way to do the job.
E-mail me at cdrecording@mrichter.com
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