The problem with large drives...

[Zep]

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.

Yes, they can be shared (at least, my Vista guru tells me the file types are compatible - YMMV). No, nothing is left in a paging file that needs to be preserved. It's just one honkin' big file of temporary space used to shuttle virtual memory pages back and forth out of RAM.

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.

No, they are not compatible. Windows is the culprit - it puts a signature on non-Windows partitions that usually invalidates them for use under Linux or any other OS. However you can use exactly the same concept for Linux systems (it's a very old idea, actually, from mainframe days).

 

[CFLarsen]

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

I had a 1-bit computer. With parity error.

So, I drank a little Chateau de Chasselet instead...

 

[Henners]

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 have a copy of James Martin's "Principles of Data-Base[sic] Management" (1976).

According to it, at 1976 prices, my laptop's hard drive is worth over $1,000,000,000. It's "core" RAM is worth another $1,000,000,000.

If you think that's scary, what I find even scarier is the idea that 30 years from now, we can all expect to have personal computing "power" that would cost about a billion bucks today.

 

[GreNME]

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.

It may very well be possible depending on how the partition is formatted (the Vista NTFS is not compatible with XP's NTFS), but either way I'd recommend against it. Instead I would suggest having separate partitions for each.

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.

Your instinct is correct. Linux handles VMM differently, and a swap partition would not be able to double as a Windows page partition.

---

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, you could always buy the larger drive and only partition off 20-40 gigs on it. You can leave the rest alone, always able to expand it later if necessary. I would actually suggest raising that number to about 80 gigs if you're going to install Vista, but like I said you can leave only a system partition on the disk and not allocate the rest. This gives you an added benefit of minimizing head movement and allowing for moving the partition space in the event of bad blocks in the future.

Just a thought. Plus you'd save money for not having to buy more expensive drives*.


* I'm actually looking forward to the ability to move all paging to solid-state drive space at some point. Total solid-state drives aren't feasible (economically) yet, but enough for paging is.

 

[Beanbag]

You know, you could always buy the larger drive and only partition off 20-40 gigs on it. You can leave the rest alone, always able to expand it later if necessary. I would actually suggest raising that number to about 80 gigs if you're going to install Vista, but like I said you can leave only a system partition on the disk and not allocate the rest. This gives you an added benefit of minimizing head movement and allowing for moving the partition space in the event of bad blocks in the future.

Just a thought. Plus you'd save money for not having to buy more expensive drives*.


* I'm actually looking forward to the ability to move all paging to solid-state drive space at some point. Total solid-state drives aren't feasible (economically) yet, but enough for paging is.

Sensible, but there's just something about having all that unused storage space. Just seems wrong.

Vista? Not for a long while. Generally speaking, Vista is the kiss of death for most current video editing software. People post in the digital video forums I frequent with problems running their software under Vista. While there are work-arounds to let you edit for a while under Vista before your system either freezes, goes off in la-la land, or loses your last half hour's edits, by far the easiest solution is to spring for an OEM copy of WinXP Pro and start over from bare metal.

It's telling when Microsoft has announced they will make Win XP available for sale for at least six months after their originally announced drop date, and that MS also had a policy where users could exchange their Vista license for XP.

Beanbag

 

[a_unique_person]

The next problem is, now that you have 1 terabyte of movies and entertainment, how are you going to watch it all?

 

[Beanbag]

One hour of straight digital video translates to roughly 12 gigs (standard definition, not HD). That's only about eighty-three hours of video per terrabyte. So, it's really not that much.

Now, compressed and encoded -- that's another matter entirely.

And remember, this is for editing. By the time I lock a project, I've looked at it so many times I don't want to see it againfor at least half a year.

Beanbag

 

[jnelso99]

It may very well be possible depending on how the partition is formatted (the Vista NTFS is not compatible with XP's NTFS), but either way I'd recommend against it. Instead I would suggest having separate partitions for each.

This kind of implies that one should not have ANY partition shared between XP and Vista if their respective NTFS's are incompatible. Heck, how does the Linux NTFS drivers work with the various NTFS partitions?

 

[Zep]

This kind of implies that one should not have ANY partition shared between XP and Vista if their respective NTFS's are incompatible. Heck, how does the Linux NTFS drivers work with the various NTFS partitions?

Typical Microsoft! I'm told Vista can access the older NTFS partitions, but older Windows struggles with or just plain won't read any newer type Vista NTFS partitions. Haven't investigated this in depth yet myself, so I'm sure it won't be that simple in real life.

Dunno about Linix compatibility. Haven't tried anything there yet at all.

I imagine there will be "compatibility shims" about soon enough, or Microsoft will add the capability to older versions of Windows.