Convert to 64K Blocks

[Stuntman]

Are there any utilities out there to allow us to convert a Hard Drive to 64K blocks without formatting the drive over? I have Sage installed on an existing XP system running other apps that I can't easily recover if I were to start the system from scratch.. so I'd like to take the current system and simply convert the drives to 64k blocks so sage runs more effeciently.

Any ideas??

Thanks all!

[blade]

Originally Posted by Stuntman

Are there any utilities out there to allow us to convert a Hard Drive to 64K blocks without formatting the drive over? I have Sage installed on an existing XP system running other apps that I can't easily recover if I were to start the system from scratch.. so I'd like to take the current system and simply convert the drives to 64k blocks so sage runs more effeciently.

You do not want to convert your OS drive to 64k. Doing so will decrease performance and waste lots of space.

The only drives that need to be 64k are dedicated recording drives. You shouldn't be using the same drive for the OS and recording directory anyway. You can use the same physical disk for both, but you need to have separate partitions so Sage isn't recording to your C drive.

[Stuntman]

Originally Posted by blade

You do not want to convert your OS drive to 64k. Doing so will decrease performance and waste lots of space.

The only drives that need to be 64k are dedicated recording drives. You shouldn't be using the same drive for the OS and recording directory anyway. You can use the same physical disk for both, but you need to have separate partitions so Sage isn't recording to your C drive.

Ok.. hadn't thought of partitioning! I have a 300Gig drive that my OS is on and I Sage is using it as well.. I can create a partition on the fly, format it in 64K blocks and move the current video directory over to it.. I think..

What about my other 2 350GB drives that are not 64K blocks.. any way to convert those without losing the video content already on them?

[BobPhoenix]

I use Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 to do this. I would recomend using True Image first to backup the partition if you can so that you can recover from problems. Never had any myself but they always suggest this when working with live data.

BobP.

[jbarr]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

I use Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 to do this. I would recomend using True Image first to backup the partition if you can so that you can recover from problems. Never had any myself but they always suggest this when working with live data.
BobP.

Ahh, another Acronis fan! I agree 100%! Acronis products are very solid. In fact, I even recommend installing a spare hard drive large enough to backup your OS partition, and then schedule weekly full and nightly incremental backups. If your OS install ever gets corrupted, it's a simple matter of doing a restore.

[Polypro]

Acronis *is* the heat, but I *have* had jobs not complete while using it through Windows. No damage, just an error code. Using the created boot disks for both Director and True Image has always been flawless, however.

P

Edit: DL.TV did a show on Freeware Non-Destructive Partitioning tools, so check their site if you want free. (Here you go: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/ )

[GKusnick]

I guess I must be in the minority then. When I tried DiskDirector 9 a couple of years ago, it would not work on my system at all, just errored out every time I hit the Commit button (which was especially annoying since the Commit button was disabled in the free trial; I had to pay up to find out it wasn't going to work). Tech support was no help; after a two-week runaround, they finally "resolved" my issue by blaming it on faulty drive hardware. This despite the fact that Seagate diagnostics found nothing wrong with my drive, and Partition Magic was able to rearrange partitions on it with no problem. In fact that same "faulty" drive is still running fine 24/7 as the boot drive in my SageTV server.

Now it may be that DiskDirector 10 is a whole lot better than 9, but unless there's been some major personnel turnover in Acronis tech support, it's going to take a lot of convincing to get me to try another Acronis product.

[jim_buchanan]

Have read this thread with interest.

I intend on recording video and will partition @ 64K for that, but I also want to use the RAID 1 mirror features of this new Intel motherboard for redundant backup of personal data, photos, etc.

I have a motherboard, Shuttle SD32G2B, that has only 2 SATA 250Gig drives.

Can I partition each drive at say 150/100 for a redundant RAID 1 150Gig capacity and then have a 100Gig-64K partition for video files on each drive?

Or does RAID configurations require the whole drive?

Thanks for any advice.

[stevech]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

I use Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 to do this. I would recomend using True Image first to backup the partition if you can so that you can recover from problems. Never had any myself but they always suggest this when working with live data.

BobP.

me too. good stuff

[Keenan]

Another vote for the Acronis product, works great.