Computer Running Slow?

[macca_dj 0]

Sorry fester

I would have to disagree with you there if you partition one drive you splitting the baby in two and there for causing more work for the reading / writing heads ,

There for making it less reliable if it was one Partition.

 

One Partition is acceptable as the hard drives read and write head was designed to span accross one Partition With the HDD Buffer ( MEMORY 8 MEG 16 MEG ) Depending on drive and Manufacturer,

Partitioning is a nice feature but will Seriously degrade the life Expectancy of your Hard drives read and write heads and internal memory becaues you are basically putting a Bridge between it so if you have 1 HDD with Two partitions it puts the data from zone one (OUTSIDE TRACKS) into memory and then has to move the head to a further point (INSIDE TRACKS) to write it back to itself out of MEMORY, accross a bridge in the middle ( PARTITION ).

 

IT WOULD BE LIKE HAVING A 12" VINYL AND A 7" VINYL SITTING ON TOP OF THE 12" VINYL AND EXPECTING THE TONE ARM TO NOT SEE THE 7 ON TOP OF THE 12 WITH NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TRANSITION FROM 12" TO 7" , ? theres a big devide for the Stylus to jump Accross and that would be the Partition.

 

The other downside to A Partitioned HDD is that if Windows or the HDD Crashes as sometimes they do you will lose everything on the HDD no matter what the Partitioning state of the HDD So i would HIGHLY RECOMMEND TWO HDD's and even Another External backup of music and data .?

 

I love the PC but to put everything in to one Basket is SUICIDAL, HDD's dont cost that much so the more the merrier,

I HAVE LOST LOTS OF DATA BUT GAINED MORE IN KNOWLEDGE,

 

All The Best

 

Macca_dj

[gadget 0]

Moving heads on a disc doesn't cost *that* much extra time to be honest (couple of ms). If you're DJing and playing mp3s and not much else is going on in the PC itself from the second partition, then there won't me that much being read from the first one, therefore you're not putting that much more "work" on the HDD..

 

Some DJ Software will buffer the entire mp3 track in one go, so while you're playing the MP3, most of the time the HDD will be idling (until you cue up another track which then gets read into memory all in one go).

 

I have two partitions on the laptop, one for the OS, and all the other stuff on it, second partition has music on it. All music is "in one place" imho and not littered around all the windows files and stuff. Easier to backup (just backup / copy D: to another drive), Music files are less likely to be fragmented, etc. etc.

 

My previous laptop had 3 partitions, one for XP day-to day, one XP partition which was trimmed down to nothing for playout, and third partition for music... Didn't suffer any "degredation" imho.

 

Something else I just thought of - If an HDD gets a bad sector it can't write to properly, the HDD firmware marks that sector as "bad" and copies the content to a spare area - usually at the end of the disc - So while you may think all your file is at the beginning of the platter, some of it (at least 512 bytes) is actually at the other end of the disc, causing the head to travel all the way along again...

 

HDDs are designed to read/write data as fast as they can, reliably, They don't care about partitions or what's on the disc where (thats what the OS does!), All an HDD presents is "block numbers" that the OS can then read/write to (through LBA / LBA48).

 

cheers

 

David

Edited October 7, 2009 by gadget

[ScottSoundz 0]

I've had this software a few months,

 

It has made a big diffrerence to my computer and is now running like a dream!