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The problem with large drives...

Beanbag

Illuminator
Beanbag
Joined
Jun 7, 2003
Messages
3,468
I just put together a new computer (AMD 64 X2) with a 500 gig hard drive and lit it up for the first time. Everything ran just fine, so I though I'd throw a copy of Win XP on it (don't worry, it's a legal copy).

Well, it's been about three hours and the hard drive STILL hasn't finished formatting. The good news is that Ken Burn's The War was on PBS, so I could watch the second episode uninterrupted. I hope to have the install finished by midnight.

The joys of digital video. You need large drives. I actually am considering adding a second 500 gig drive to have 1 tb (mainly for bragging rights). I can remember when 5 megs was a large hard drive, and cost around $500. I got my 500 gig SATA for $109.

Sigh.

Regards;
Beanbag
 
I always use the quick format option, takes seconds to format a 100GB partition.
 
Huh?! :eek:

Have you thought of partitioning the drive first? Surely you don't need all 500GB for a Windows system partition?

How about making the first, say, 10GB or 20GB the system partition, and the remaining squillion GB for "your stuff". Then you can format properly, install quickly, and get on with your life. Come back later to format the rest, as a background or overnight job.

(Myself, I would add a 2GB to 4GB paging partition just after the system partition as well, and move paging to there. Saves excessive pagefile fragmentation, and thus keeps performance up.)
 
I'd only do that on disk technologies that I trusted to do online bad-blocking reliably. ;)
 
Beanbag said:
The joys of digital video. You need large drives. I actually am considering adding a second 500 gig drive to have 1 tb (mainly for bragging rights). I can remember when 5 megs was a large hard drive, and cost around $500. I got my 500 gig SATA for $109.
Click to expand...
You had a 5 meg drive? That's way too easy. The IBM 1130 had a 1 meg drive with a capacity of 512K when formatted.

~~ Paul
 
Zep said:
How about making the first, say, 10GB or 20GB the system partition, and the remaining squillion GB for "your stuff".
Click to expand...
This is generally fine for most people, although it needs to be larger in some instances. I had a 20GB system partition once, and between my wifes huge Sims2 downloads, (which gets put in My Documents, dumbest idea ever), and this video, photo editing software she had it wasn't enough. The software would spool the temp file while it converted large video formats on the OS partition and there was no way to change it. So it constantly ran out of space. I later ended up rebuilding the drive and gave her like a 50GB OS partition just to be sure :D.
(Myself, I would add a 2GB to 4GB paging partition just after the system partition as well, and move paging to there. Saves excessive pagefile fragmentation, and thus keeps performance up.)
Click to expand...
I was under the impression that moving the pagefile really only held any slight performance boost when it was put on a completely seperate disk from the OS. I know on the server side this is very much the case. Having it on a different partition, but still on the same physical drive wouldn't do much as the I/O for the pagefile is still hitting the same disk the OS is on.
 
voidx said:
This is generally fine for most people, although it needs to be larger in some instances. I had a 20GB system partition once, and between my wifes huge Sims2 downloads, (which gets put in My Documents, dumbest idea ever), and this video, photo editing software she had it wasn't enough. The software would spool the temp file while it converted large video formats on the OS partition and there was no way to change it. So it constantly ran out of space. I later ended up rebuilding the drive and gave her like a 50GB OS partition just to be sure :D.
Click to expand...

Try setting the TEMP and/or TMP environment variables to another partition? And you can move the My Documents (and the other "My" directories and maybe your home directory as well) to another partition as well with a quick registry edit. There do seem to be some apps out there that still hardcode stuff to "C:" or "C:\My Documents", but I imagine they're pretty rare nowadays.
 
Definitely err on the slightly larger side... because you can't make it any bigger afterwards.

I made a nice compact 10GB partition for Windows once, and the rest of my drive was in larger partitions. Ran out of space, thought I'd use Partition Magic and increase the system drive. Ohh, it says I can't. I don't believe it, I'll move all the other partitions to the end and then increase it. Fine, it says, feeling lucky punk?

During reimaging, I put in a larger C partition.
 
jnelso99 said:
Try setting the TEMP and/or TMP environment variables to another partition? And you can move the My Documents (and the other "My" directories and maybe your home directory as well) to another partition as well with a quick registry edit. There do seem to be some apps out there that still hardcode stuff to "C:" or "C:\My Documents", but I imagine they're pretty rare nowadays.
Click to expand...
Windows differentiates between a Boot partition and a System (OS) partition. The default temp directly spooling often takes place on the System partition, and there's no way to change that.

However, you're correct, only the laziest of developers would do this and it isn't common. Ironically enough it was Microsofts Imaging Suite that did it. Heh, if anyone should know better...

** I should clarify, if a piece of software is set to use the temp folder of the System partition, there's no way to redirect it **
 
alfaniner said:
Why?
Click to expand...
Heh why do I let her do that? Or why is it the worst idea ever?

If the first, she's my wife and I must obey.

If the second, Sims downloads are known for taking up a lot of space. She easily has 3 or 4GB of downloads there. Storing those in My Documents is dumb because, should you want to move them, or should you be redirecting your My Documents, or doing any kind of folder syncing, you now have several GB of game data to transfer around.

I admit that only nerdballs such as myself have issues with this as I have a windows domain setup at home and had to puzzle out why my wife suddenly was unable to logon with her domain account.

It was because at logon it was attempting to sync and copy 4GB of Sims data back and forth to her profile on the server. Which had limited disk space to begin with.

Keep game profiles and save game point data in My Documents is no biggie as they tend to be small. However, even that is kind of risky. Corrupt your windows profile, you lose all your save game data.
 
voidx said:
This is generally fine for most people, although it needs to be larger in some instances. I had a 20GB system partition once, and between my wifes huge Sims2 downloads, (which gets put in My Documents, dumbest idea ever), and this video, photo editing software she had it wasn't enough. The software would spool the temp file while it converted large video formats on the OS partition and there was no way to change it. So it constantly ran out of space. I later ended up rebuilding the drive and gave her like a 50GB OS partition just to be sure :D.
Click to expand...
Sure! :) Out of 500GB, 50GB is not a huge chunk. Although I have very rarely seen the need to go over 40GB, even on massive servers.

voidx said:
I was under the impression that moving the pagefile really only held any slight performance boost when it was put on a completely seperate disk from the OS. I know on the server side this is very much the case. Having it on a different partition, but still on the same physical drive wouldn't do much as the I/O for the pagefile is still hitting the same disk the OS is on.
Click to expand...
Certainly that method won't give you the separate spindle performance of paging on another disk.

However Windows has the annoying habit of allowing the paging file(s) to be fragmented if they get created, moved or extended. And very often this happen on a badly fragmented system disk. More often than not, extending a page file would result in far worse performance! Because it was now in a couple thousand tiny chunks, not one or two big chunks...

The easy way is to create a paging-only partition next to the system partition (sized according to your tastes - MS recommend 2 or 3 times RAM size). I usually call it drive P: for Paging. Create a page file there and get paging off the system partition. The page file will then be in one or two big chunks forever, and physically nearby the system partition anyway. Oh, and then defrag the system partition again!

It's not absolutely peak system tuning, sure, but it does a very good job without any special software tools required. 80:20 rule!
 
Zep said:
Sure! :) Out of 500GB, 50GB is not a huge chunk. Although I have very rarely seen the need to go over 40GB, even on massive servers.
Click to expand...
Indeed. My recommendation to someone "building" (meaning assembling from prebuilt parts) their own system is to get themselves one hard drive for the OS, and one or two hard drives for everything else. For servers, up that number to three separate partitionable disks (or, in servers that can handle it, disk arrays). One disk (or array) for the OS, the other for documents and storage, with the third one in servers being the 'swap' or 'paging' partition.

Zep said:
Certainly that method won't give you the separate spindle performance of paging on another disk.
Click to expand...
You have no idea how happy it makes me to read other posters on the internet who understand why simply partitioning single disks provides no inherent performance benefits.

Zep said:
However Windows has the annoying habit of allowing the paging file(s) to be fragmented if they get created, moved or extended. And very often this happen on a badly fragmented system disk. More often than not, extending a page file would result in far worse performance! Because it was now in a couple thousand tiny chunks, not one or two big chunks...
Click to expand...
I agree it's annoying, but I can see why it was designed that way. 15-20 years ago, at least. Most of the reasons it was initially done that way have since become non-issues, and while great strides in VMM were developed in Windows (and other OSes), they never changed their old page file behavior.

Zep said:
The easy way is to create a paging-only partition next to the system partition (sized according to your tastes - MS recommend 2 or 3 times RAM size). I usually call it drive P: for Paging. Create a page file there and get paging off the system partition. The page file will then be in one or two big chunks forever, and physically nearby the system partition anyway. Oh, and then defrag the system partition again!
Click to expand...
This is very good advice.
 
I'm thinking of setting up my system as a dual-boot XP and Vista machine. Creating a separate paging partition sounds like what I want to do - but can it be shared between the XP and Vista installs? I wouldn't think paging data would need to be saved from boot to boot unless there's some optimization going on.

And heck, if I want to triple-boot and add a Linux install into the mix, would its swap partition be able to be used as a Windows paging partition? Instinct tells me no since Linux will format it differently, but I'm sure someone else would know more than me.
 
Please, Please, Please, buy an external USB or Firewire drive bigger than your internal disk and back up to it all the time!

Actually, buy TWO disks; First copy backup A to backup B. Then copy your disk onto backup A. This way you have your current disk contents and the contents at your last backup in case something happens DURING your backup.

I'd do this at least once a week, and there are tools that will automate this.
 
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All this came about because it's getting pretty near impossible to buy a "small" hard drive (say around 100 gigs) new at any supplier. The 500 gig SATA drive I bought was $109 USD. The smallest SATA drive I could find at the same place was around 160 gigs for about $150.

Yes, I would like to have a small hard drive of maybe 20 to 40 gigs just to have the system on, so once I get it configured the way I like it (this is a machine specifically for editing video, and not much else), then I can ghost it off to several DVDs and just reload the system after every few projects to have a clean system to work on.

You know, I never thought I'd end up griping about inexpensive hard drives being too large.

Beanbag
 
a_unique_person said:
A full format is only necessary if you want to check that it all works. If it's new, or feel the drive has not been doing anything suspicious, a quick format works fine.
Click to expand...
That's why the full format: I don't trust anything new that hasn't been burned in for at least a couple of days. I had one drive punk out on me after a couple of hours and lost some original stuff that I was never able to reconstruct exactly as it was.

The new machine's essentially in its final configuration with the addition of a Firewire card and two extra cooling fans to ventilate the case. I also picked up a widescreen 19" LCD monitor. About the only change I might make is to swap in a faster processor. For now, it's going to spend a few days happily spinning the drives to see if anything dies from infant mortality.

Beanbag
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
You had a 5 meg drive? That's way too easy. The IBM 1130 had a 1 meg drive with a capacity of 512K when formatted.

~~ Paul
Click to expand...
Hoss, I remember when a system with 16K of RAM was considered a large system. I remember how proud I was when I finally maxed out a Z80 system I built with 32 2K static RAM chips on a wire-wrap board.

Beanbag
 
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