Advise requested....new 250GB SATA HDD

[KINGofBLEH]

I am building a new system for myself that will be used primarily for video capture, storage and playback (from cable, TV, DVD and camcorder).

It's a P4 3.0Ghz system with a 250GB SATA drive (O/S = XP Pro). It will be the only drive, so I do not plan on running RAID at this time. It will be used both as the system drive and a storage drive for large .avi and .mpg files. I may also store my 15GB mp3 collection on it at some point.

I am seeking some recommendations on how you would partition this drive. In the past, I have always partitioned large drives in order to reduce read/write times and improve head longevity. Is this still a good idea with SATA drives, even with improved spinrates and larger cache?

[kato2274]

just a thought. but why not spend another $50 or less and get a 20-40GB IDE drive to just run windows and applications and use the SATA as nothing but storage. the process time on multimedia creation is normally from opening the file, not the program, so it really wouldn't matter that you launced premiere or whatever from the IDE but rather that you were pulling the data from the fast SATA.

I'd probably partition just for ease of finding stuff....but I partition pretty much everything anyway.

[Shard92]

I agree with the above... I'm not doing this myself currently but have researched it for a few customers and in general you get better performance if the data to be worked on is stored on another drive ( and not just another partition. )

[KINGofBLEH]

Ok ya'll talked me into it. Off I go to the computer store to pick up an 80GB IDE.

[kato2274]

Ok ya'll talked me into it. Off I go to the computer store to pick up an 80GB IDE.

with the 80GB IDE, you can just house your mp3s on a partition on it since you're not really going to need superfast access for those files.