To partition or not to partition?

[srt4hokie]

So I’m looking at getting a Western digital Caviar SE16 400GB hard drive. I will be running it with a SATA controller card for now until I get a new MB that supports it onboard.

Should I partition it into smaller sections, will it improve the performance of sage tv? If I should partition it how big should each partition be?

[stevech]

I setup a drive solely for SageTV videos. It's the only drive on that IDE chain. And I created one partition for the whole (160MB) drive, and specified non-standard large block size (64MB). The latter was to reduce the number of I/Os per minute.

I'm about to add another drive and perhaps go into Windows XP's support for a multi-drive volume.

Aren't drive prices amazing? I remember on my job when we had a miracle 300MB Century Data drive, on our PDP-11/45's. It was as big as a washing machine, with removable platters that were as big as a water bucket. Cost tens of thousands of dollars. And my first home PC hard disk (pre-IBM PC) was $2000 in 1980's dollars and was 5MB.

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by stevech

I'm about to add another drive and perhaps go into Windows XP's support for a multi-drive volume.

I would just add in a second drive and keep it as its own volume. If you did a mulit-drive volume, and one dirve died, you'd probably lose the entire contents of both drives, whereas, if you had 2 separate volumes, you'd only lose 1/2 your files. Better yet is to put some redundancy in your system with a RAID system.

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by srt4hokie

Should I partition it into smaller sections, will it improve the performance of sage tv? If I should partition it how big should each partition be?

I haven't seen anything that would say that multiple partitions on the same HD would help in SAGe. In fact, you could run into some problems with not having enough free space on any one partition for a recording, when you had more than enough total free space over the entire HD.

Just make one big partition with 64k clusters.

[srt4hokie]

Ok, so let me ask this how can I format using 64k clusters? I'm ussing windows 2000 right now and when I looked under format 64k was not a opition, only 512 and highre bytes was listed.

[JonTom]

Also - is it possible to convert a drive to 64k clusters without destroying the data on the drive?

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by JonTom

Also - is it possible to convert a drive to 64k clusters without destroying the data on the drive?

maybe with a program like Partition Magic, but with the Microsoft stuff, It would requre a reformat, and, poof, data gone.

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by srt4hokie

Ok, so let me ask this how can I format using 64k clusters? I'm ussing windows 2000 right now and when I looked under format 64k was not a opition, only 512 and highre bytes was listed.

I dunno. Win2k does support 64K clusters. Use the disk management module to do the format of the drive. It should be NTFS, and it should let you change the "allocation unit size", that is the cluster size, pick the last one, 64k and then format

[nielm]

As mantioned: right click My Comp / Manage / Disk Management

also:
Start->Run
cmd
format drive: /a:64k /fs:ntfs

[jlabrue]

Originally Posted by srt4hokie

So I’m looking at getting a Western digital Caviar SE16 400GB hard drive. I will be running it with a SATA controller card for now until I get a new MB that supports it onboard.

Should I partition it into smaller sections, will it improve the performance of sage tv? If I should partition it how big should each partition be?

You will not see any performace difference/improvement by partitioning the drive into smaller partitions. In fact if you have more than a couple you could see a performance decrease as disk i/o jumps from one logical partition to another if you access multiple partitions at once.