Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: minke on September 30, 2009, 04:33:37 PM
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Just waiting for my retail copy of windows 7,Ive got a decision to make.-
I have a 160gb seagate drive (about 5 years old) and a new samsung 1Tb drive
Should I install OS onto smaller/older drive to keep it fast or put it on the newer one,in case of hdd failure?
Guys I know at work all have windows on real small drives,and keep their mega storage for files,so I suppose that is an option. Spent lots on my rig this year already,I'm not really inclined to spend any more.
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If I was in your shoes, I put it on the newer drive (more so if the older drive isn't SATA).
Use the old HD as a back up in addition to putting your important files on CD/DVD.
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my 2 cents which ever drive you decide ,if you don't use any mirror image software for back up,
since your going to do a new install eventually here, be a good time to start. Acronis and ghost are pay for programs and there is freeware out there, i don't know the names off hand.
Tim O/Cattb
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my 2 cents which ever drive you decide ,if you don't use any mirror image software for back up,
since your going to do a new install eventually here, be a good time to start. Acronis and ghost are pay for programs and there is freeware out there, i don't know the names off hand.
Tim O/Cattb
As far as open source software goes, I've been using Clonezilla (quite successfully) from a Live CD for partition & disk cloning.
But technically, Clonezilla is really a Linux distro containing partimage among other tools, rather than a "software package" - and although it's well enough integrated to be not a whole lot more more difficult to learn to use than Norton's Ghost if you understand the fundamentals, it's still a bit "techy" and I'm not entirely sure that someone who's asking a question as basic as this one is (no offense meant) is likely to be able to deal successfully with it. A commercial program might be better.
<S>
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I would think partitioning the 1 Tb HD would be best.......
keep the windows 7 OS on a smaller partition, say 120 to 250 gigs in size....... then make 1 or more partitions for back up purposes.... or to even install another OS...... ( some might would want to go to even a smaller partition size for the OS partition, perhaps around 60 gig, 80 gig size.......)
just a suggestion.......
to add; I believe in redundancy.... meaning using RAID 1 to have an instant backup in case of HD failure or problems....... and always make a Recovery disk or CD soon as you get your OS loaded and most important software app.s loaded......
just another suggestion
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i agree with Tequila.
make a small partion (80g) from ur 1tb for ur main OS.
win7 has a built in partition manager that lets u resize/create partitions in win7 so if u find 80g is not enough u can easily make it larger.
i been running win7 pro (full release not beta and its legal) for about 2 months now and i prefer it big time over XP.
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Actually I didnt think about partitioning the drive :rolleyes:
Its will be a fresh install, not having used or even tried vista, I'm going straight from xp, got all files I want to keep burned to cd,including IE8 (yeah I know some of you guys hate IE,but it works for me)
I'll stick with a 40gb partition for now.
Any other ideas or suggestions? Thanks for the help so far :salute
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I would not partition the drive and particularly I would not install any program like a flight sim that I want to run well (fast) on anything but the primary partition of any drive.
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b4 u remove xp download all the drivers u need (graphics mainly) especially any LAN drivers.
ive been using partition drives for over 10 years and never had any problems doing so.
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I would not partition the drive and particularly I would not install any program like a flight sim that I want to run well (fast) on anything but the primary partition of any drive.
Do you have any factual basis for this?
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Every description of hard drive partitioning schemes I have ever come across defines secondary partitions as areas of the hard drive outside of the primary boot area. The boot area will be the fastest to access in every case and therefore the best place to put files that you want fast access to would be the primary partition. That being anecdotal evidence I have actually tried this and I discovered that using a secondary partition will slow down access and over time things just get worse and worse. That said you may not notice this at first with AHII because the hard drive accesses seem to grab much smaller data chunks than do programs like FSX using photo terrain images.
How much do you want to read? I could write about three pages on how to setup W7 for flight simulator X which will also make sure the system runs AHII more than fast enough.
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Every description of hard drive partitioning schemes I have ever come across defines secondary partitions as areas of the hard drive outside of the primary boot area. The boot area will be the fastest to access in every case and therefore the best place to put files that you want fast access to would be the primary partition. That being anecdotal evidence I have actually tried this and I discovered that using a secondary partition will slow down access and over time things just get worse and worse. That said you may not notice this at first with AHII because the hard drive accesses seem to grab much smaller data chunks than do programs like FSX using photo terrain images.
How much do you want to read? I could write about three pages on how to setup W7 for flight simulator X which will also make sure the system runs AHII more than fast enough.
I can't say anything about FSX but AH2 needs little to no disk I/O during gameplay. It will load some textures occasionally most likely but that's it. Partitioning will have zero effect on gameplay. Comparing AH2 to FSX is comparing a mouse to an elephant.
The slowest part of a 1Tb 7200rpm drive will still be loads faster than an older smaller 7200rpm drive at its fastest. Not to mention that partitioning per se has nothing to do with using the inner areas of platters - they will be used eventually when the disk fills up no matter what. So it's really not worth even thinking about.
I have always partitioned my drives in several chunks and I never suffer from any performance problems. Quite the opposite.
Now, factually what you said is true. Partitioning will split the disk and the secondary partition will be on the 'slower' part of the disk. But the gaming experience is not dependent on it. The difference is negligble. People should concentrate on things that matter and stop digging for trouble where it's the least expected.
If games would constantly access hdd no game would run properly. There's about 1000 times performance difference between ram and hdd.
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Yes but this is minke (not Ripley) and I believe AH cannot be the only use he has for his system. I would rather fully inform a user than limit them to the information I think they need which could be a very bad assumption.
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Yes but this is minke (not Ripley) and I believe AH cannot be the only use he has for his system. I would rather fully inform a user than limit them to the information I think they need which could be a very bad assumption.
I'm 99.99999% certain you're concentrating on a totally futile thing here, Chalenge. I'm sure Skuzzy can verify if AH2 is dependant on high speed disk I/O during gameplay. If it is, I have not noticed it.
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Its not always about AHII Ripley and thats the point.
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Actually I didnt think about partitioning the drive :rolleyes:
Its will be a fresh install, got all files I want to keep burned to cd,including IE8 (yeah I know some of you guys hate IE,but it works for me)
minke, I am almost certian that windows 7 comes default with IE8
I suggest/recommend you use Skuzzy's IE settings ( think they are located in the stickys at top of the Tech forum, I maybe wrong though ) then allow authorization for your most needed addon's/plug-ins afterwards......to fit your needs
as MrRipley has posted most all todays HD's are faster than older ones, but doing maintenance on a 1Tb HD partitioned in whole is a "TIMELY" project...... in my view, it would be much better if you installed your main OS & main apps to a smaller partitioned area.......( thinking long term here down the road )
YMMV
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Its not always about AHII Ripley and thats the point.
No, FSX is the exception to the rule most likely. When HDD gets accessed for whatever reason, the game is lost. HDD is inherently slow.
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If I had to do all this I would seriously consider getting a new faster harddrive _now_.
Reasoning behind it? You get more performance, more hd space and same amount of trouble as if you'd do it again later on. Another benefit is that you can then use the old hd for swap file giving you an added boost again.
If your existing hdd is 3-4 years old I would definately get a new 1Tb or 1.5Tb 7200rpm drive on the side. You'll notice a marked improvement in i/o performance. Just remember to partition the Tb drive to at least 2 partitions, 200 or so Gb for OS and programs and other partition for AH etc. games that will not require installation to program files. This makes a reformat of c: a breeze later on - especially if you back up the cleanly installed image of c: on the leftover hd or partition.
I agree with the above quote from a not to old thread, for your needs minke
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I agree with the above quote from a not to old thread, for your needs minke
Just notice that I didn't mention anything about gaming in context of a faster harddrive. The benefit is mainly lower load times. On other things as large file copy etc. the difference is noticeable.
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No, FSX is the exception to the rule most likely. When HDD gets accessed for whatever reason, the game is lost. HDD is inherently slow.
FSX is the exception when it comes to games but it is not the only exception when it comes to applications and you and I do not know what minke is planning to use his system for until he tells us.
Just to be clear here I would very much prefer to have three to six hard drives (using four with two in RAID configuration) over one hard drive with six partitions or two hard drives with three partitions or any other combination. Why? Its much easier to get the system to haul butt in every aspect of use thats why.
Another aspect I failed to mention is simultaneous access to two drives which todays systems can certainly do but which is impossible or self-defeating with a single drive and multiple partitions. For instance. I have my OS on one drive and FSX on multiple drives (main program on one... scenery on another... traffic on yet another) and when I record film with FRAPS it goes to yet another hard drive (even when using AHII).
Your approach cannot compare period especially if a user is not willing to shutdown background processes (and recomending users do that can destroy their systems if they are not able to properly cope with it). I would love to hear from Skuzzy about some details about AH myself because it seems like stutters would be mainly caused by disk access and not because of video memory use or anything like that.
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FSX is the exception when it comes to games but it is not the only exception when it comes to applications and you and I do not know what minke is planning to use his system for until he tells us.
Just to be clear here I would very much prefer to have three to six hard drives (using four with two in RAID configuration) over one hard drive with six partitions or two hard drives with three partitions or any other combination. Why? Its much easier to get the system to haul butt in every aspect of use thats why.
Another aspect I failed to mention is simultaneous access to two drives which todays systems can certainly do but which is impossible or self-defeating with a single drive and multiple partitions. For instance. I have my OS on one drive and FSX on multiple drives (main program on one... scenery on another... traffic on yet another) and when I record film with FRAPS it goes to yet another hard drive (even when using AHII).
Your approach cannot compare period especially if a user is not willing to shutdown background processes (and recomending users do that can destroy their systems if they are not able to properly cope with it). I would love to hear from Skuzzy about some details about AH myself because it seems like stutters would be mainly caused by disk access and not because of video memory use or anything like that.
I think you're a bit out of touch with reality here. Most users have only one hdd on their computer. Leaving it unpartitioned means they will have all their junk on C:
Now that's just appauling to even think about. The first problem they get with the OS they're in big big trouble if the problem requires a format. It means the user should have planned ahead and do regular full backups of his system (yeah with 1 hdd, 200 dvd's per month?). I can tell you this ain't gonna happen.
It's astronomically better to separate the OS in a separate partition from other files. The performance impact from doing that is no different from using an empty hdd compared to 80% full hdd. Do you stop using your drives when they start to get full because they become too slow? And I'm not referring to the SSD fiasco of yours now :)
Now, if this user said he was looking for an ultra-performance state of the art system he should not worry the least about partitioning the drive. He should be getting megaexpensive 10-15k rpm drives and do multiple raid configuration that ends up costing more alone than most people's computers. I saw no indication of wishing to do that though. Disk partitioning is NOT a performance issue in day to day life In My Humble Opinnion.
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Food for thought: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/tulloch_partition.mspx
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Now you are being ridiculous and not seeing the forest for the trees. What you are suggesting is that a user take one large drive and place the OS on the primary and software on the secondary partitions and there isnt any way to save the secondary if the primary requires a format (you went there not me).
RAID configurations are only worth it to people that need speed in video editing and for programs like FSX that use large images for terrain or something like that and super fast drives about the same thing. In those cases a standard 7200rpm drive will work in a properly setup RAID just as well as a faster 15000 rpm drive and I challenge you to tell the difference (its like comparing 60fps to 70fps you cant see it). Its much easier to get a small drive for the OS and a larger drive for programs and games. Yes what I use isnt for everyone but its a great example of how to speed things up. With your system a FAT problem or other issue requiring a format and all data is gone (OS and games and apps).
I use a hard drive dock to back up to using Acronis True Image (more hard drives). I think hard drives are cheap compared to the time it takes in reformatting and reinstalling software. A weeks worth of installing and registering can be restored in 30 minutes time my way. DVDs? What are you thinking? If cash is so tight you can only afford one drive you WILL be stuck when your drive dies (not if).
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Now you are being ridiculous and not seeing the forest for the trees. What you are suggesting is that a user take one large drive and place the OS on the primary and software on the secondary partitions and there isnt any way to save the secondary if the primary requires a format (you went there not me).
I think you have a major problem with reading comprehension. Read again and see I stated exactly the OPPOSITE.
One drive is bad if the drive dies totally, yes. But one drive and two partitions are 100% better if only the OS goes corrupt or you get a nasty virus.
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Just to be clear about a point in the linked article to MS and what others may think.
Multiple drives cannot simultaneously read/write data. It is a physical impossibility as only one bus master device (CPU, drive, ethernet, video...) can read/write RAM at a time. The commands can be sent to multiple drives, but when the data for any given command is ready (read or write), only one device can the CPU memory or I/O bus, at a time.
For hard drive access, the command phase is an insignificant part of the overall time it takes to actually complete a command.
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I think you have a major problem with reading comprehension. Read again and see I stated exactly the OPPOSITE.
One drive is bad if the drive dies totally, yes. But one drive and two partitions are 100% better if only the OS goes corrupt or you get a nasty virus.
I would think you would want to reformat a drive in the case a nasty virus hits. Its like going into orbit and niking the planet its the only real way to be sure. :D
Skuzzy points out that reading and writing data at the exact same time is impossible but compare accessing two seperate folders on a single drive versus two folders on seperate drives for a moment. Particularly in the case of a dual partition the head of the drive has to move a great distance when compared to two seperate drives accessing folders that 'by design of zone filing' will be at the fastest read area of the drive. I will say that this too is very difficult for humans to see and realize the difference but with programs so slaved to I/O as we have today this can become a severe data flow problem that results in video stuttering and I have myself seen where using more than a single drive can really clear things up and smooth things out.
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Multiple drives can help improve overall performance, if they are configured correctly to spread accesses evenly across them. The reduction in seek times would be the improvement made.
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minke, I am almost certian that windows 7 comes default with IE8
So are they including web browsers with 7 or not? I was told they were,but I was getting conflicting info. Will all released retail versions have it?
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The browser will be available with all versions of Windows 7 regardless which country you are buying it for or from.
Unless the EU changes its mind again.
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i got win7 pro and it came with IE8. im in the uk
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i forgot to mention u can uninstall IE8 in windows features
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I would think you would want to reformat a drive in the case a nasty virus hits. Its like going into orbit and niking the planet its the only real way to be sure. :D
Skuzzy points out that reading and writing data at the exact same time is impossible but compare accessing two seperate folders on a single drive versus two folders on seperate drives for a moment. Particularly in the case of a dual partition the head of the drive has to move a great distance when compared to two seperate drives accessing folders that 'by design of zone filing' will be at the fastest read area of the drive. I will say that this too is very difficult for humans to see and realize the difference but with programs so slaved to I/O as we have today this can become a severe data flow problem that results in video stuttering and I have myself seen where using more than a single drive can really clear things up and smooth things out.
What's your point? The ability to format easily at will is the benefit I'm looking for with partitioning.
You're comparing apples to oranges with your multiple drive configuration. If the user has just one large drive he should partition it. Adding drives doubles the cost, partitioning costs nothing. I'm not disagreeing with having multiple harddrives - the grim reality is, however, that many people can't afford them. I have 5 harddrives in my gaming rig and 3 on my sons gaming rig.
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Sometimes you can be so dense but I certainly understand being stubborn. :D
The point is that using the small drive he ALREADY HAS for the OS is only going to be slow during boot and he can always use the other drive for programs.
You can keep spreading this partition foolishness all you want but IMHO it is just a poor mans way of having extra drives and YES it slows the system performance. I understand minke says he has enough invested in the computer already and does not want to spend more money but partitions are in my way of thinking a poor way to use a hard drive. The worse scenario I can think of is some process requiring a disk read while you are playing a game and suddenly you are stuck seeing warps and freeze frames and major stutters... might not be so bad if you are willing to put up with that but I am not.
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Sometimes you can be so dense but I certainly understand being stubborn. :D
The point is that using the small drive he ALREADY HAS for the OS is only going to be slow during boot and he can always use the other drive for programs.
You can keep spreading this partition foolishness all you want but IMHO it is just a poor mans way of having extra drives and YES it slows the system performance. I understand minke says he has enough invested in the computer already and does not want to spend more money but partitions are in my way of thinking a poor way to use a hard drive. The worse scenario I can think of is some process requiring a disk read while you are playing a game and suddenly you are stuck seeing warps and freeze frames and major stutters... might not be so bad if you are willing to put up with that but I am not.
It's not foolishness. Well, except if you call Microsoft expert articles foolish.
If he plans to keep the OS on the old worn out drive then naturally he won't have to partition the new drive. Doing so will give him a penalty in OS responsiveness though. Especially if he doesn't move his swap file to the new harddrive.
Windows7 will do agressive caching and search indexing that will be negatively hit by using the old slower drive. Now that's a way to ruin your system performance and you're worried about partitioning? LOL!
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Not too long ago a certain someone named Ripley told me that even the older 5200rpm drives have just as good a performance as 7200 drives with large memory caches. Different day different story I guess.
I know for a fact that multiple drives will allow for faster access of data especially over partitioning.
I went to school with some people that work at Microsoft Ripley. They are not infallible.
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Multiple drives can help improve overall performance, if they are configured correctly to spread accesses evenly across them. The reduction in seek times would be the improvement made.
While Skuzzy is quite correct that the actual transfer from the drives cannot occur simultaneously (and he knows more about drives that I do by a long shot) - I do believe that another design aspect that improves performance at times is that the drives can also simultaneously read data into their onboard cache, such that while the DMA transfer is in effect for one drive the others can be retrieving the data blocks requested until execution of the command queue is suspended due to the full cache - and thereby imparting a certain amount of parallelism into the slowest portion of the data read phase (the actual access of the platters). You can't transfer the data off of the drives simultanously with standard controller hardware - but you can ready it simultanously.
What I don't know is how well Windows schedules the command queues to take advantage of this. I suspect it's quite poorly - especially since a Raid 1 device in Windows seems to perform marginally better at best and often no better than a single drive.
What I also know is that in our testing and evaluation of the openfiler SAN (caveat and disclaimer - this was not a scientific test evaluation, but an in the field eval intended to resolve another issue), using the openfiler SAN (i..e a Linux distro based on IET) configured with similar drives and controller as an existing Windows Server with DAS outperformed the existing server by about 80% - despite the fact that the overall memory use of the NAS was in the neighborhood of 1 GB of the 4GB installed vs 4 GB for the Windows Server, leading me to suspect that there is a lot of unexplained overhead in the Windows 2003 disk subsystem on this particular system. I was hoping for on par at best, and was very pleasantly surprised (I had expected the overhead of ISCSI to degrade performance slightly - I wasn't expecting better than the existing performance). Whether there are instances where Windows performs better I can't say either.
All YMMV, IMHO, etc.
<S>
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There area number of esoteric ways to get some level of performance gains in the Windows disk subsystem. True, multiple drives can fill thier cache simultaneously. Unfortunately, Windows takes a very serial approach to reads from a disk drive.
Due to the above, many drives in the market make use of a segmented cache architecture and they continue to fill that cache after satisfying the Windows request. The hope being they will be able to provide faster access to read data.
By using multiple hard drives, you statistically increase the chances of a cache hit occurring within the disk subsystem.
Of course, how effective this is, remains a hit and miss proposition as the Windows OS also provides read caching.
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Not too long ago a certain someone named Ripley told me that even the older 5200rpm drives have just as good a performance as 7200 drives with large memory caches. Different day different story I guess.
I know for a fact that multiple drives will allow for faster access of data especially over partitioning.
I went to school with some people that work at Microsoft Ripley. They are not infallible.
Please show me where I said that because I have never said anything such. This is the second time in a row that you make claims that are exactly reverse to the ones I made in reality. Either you're trolling or you simply do not understand what you read.
What I said was that a benchmark test showed a new 2Tb harddrive @ 5400rpm beating a smaller older 7200rpm drive. Which was and is a fact. It seems you still cannot understand the concept of data density and what it does to read/write performance. I'll give you a clue: it increases it proportionally with increase of density.
This is because the tracking head can pass more data per revolution compared to a smaller, lower density drive. If the data density difference is large enough (+ larger cache effect etc. taken into account) even the slower spinning drive can beat the faster spinning one in throughput performance.
As it is very clear that you cannot comprehend the technical details we're discussing here IMO it would be best to avoid commenting.
I'll give you a benefit of a doubt with Microsoft experts being fallible. Please prove the article I posted as being wrong from a professional, reliable source.