formatting new media hard drives for multimedia

[Kenneth]

I have just finished building a new desktop and had a question about
setting up my hard drives for multimedia files. I have three hard
drives in the system, a C: drive for the local OS (XP Prof.), and two
500 GB drives mirrored for data storage. We'll be using these data
drives to store music, videos, photos and other documents. I have these
two 500 GB drives set up in a RAID1 configuration in case one fails.
What is the best way to set up/format these two data drives? I'm
planning on formatting them using NTFS, but what about basic disk vs.
dynamic disks? Should I create partitions on the drives based on the
file type (i.e. music, videos, photos, etc.) or leave it as one large
volume with many shared folders for each file type? What other things
do I need to consider to maximize performance? I'm planning on
connecting my home entertainment center to this desktop to access media
files as well, will this change how I should set them up? Any advice
would be great. Thanks in advance!!

 

[Guest]

Performance wise,RAID 1 is much slower than RAID 0,RAID 1 needs to
write to 2 drives instead of the way RAID 0 writes really to only 1.Thier
really is no benifit to RAID 1,as this configuration doesnt support hot
swapping of the hds anyway,as would RAID 5 or RAID 10.Youre best bet
is to format them thru xp cd,(boot to xp cd,use the F6 option) and format
and install the on the RAID set seperately (unplug other hds)....

 

[Kenneth]

Andrew,
Thanks for your response. I do eventually want to use a combination of
drive striping and drive mirroring when i'm able to add additional hard
drives. For now though, I'm content with just mirroring the drives for
redundancy. Right now, I'm more interested in how to set up the drives
before I begin loading them up with data. Any thoughts on basic disk
vs. dynamic disk? Should I set up the drive as a physical drive with
it's own drive letter or map to shared folders and assign them their
own drive letter?

 

[Bob Willard]

I have just finished building a new desktop and had a question about
setting up my hard drives for multimedia files. I have three hard
drives in the system, a C: drive for the local OS (XP Prof.), and two
500 GB drives mirrored for data storage. We'll be using these data
drives to store music, videos, photos and other documents. I have these
two 500 GB drives set up in a RAID1 configuration in case one fails.
What is the best way to set up/format these two data drives? I'm
planning on formatting them using NTFS, but what about basic disk vs.
dynamic disks? Should I create partitions on the drives based on the
file type (i.e. music, videos, photos, etc.) or leave it as one large
volume with many shared folders for each file type? What other things
do I need to consider to maximize performance? I'm planning on
connecting my home entertainment center to this desktop to access media
files as well, will this change how I should set them up? Any advice
would be great. Thanks in advance!!

Somewhat OT, but -

RAID1 gives you some protection against HD failure, but in a system that
has reasonable cooling, HD failure is relatively rare. RAID1 gives you
no protection against many other, more likely, causes of data loss
including: AC power line spike or brownout, flaky/undersized power supply,
loose power/signal cable, clogged filter, blown cap on MB, single-bit
error in non-ECC RAM, air conditioning failure, fire, theft, virus,
design oversight in commodity OS or app, or -- the most common of all --
fumble fingers.

Backup, backup, backup.

 

[Kenneth]

All great info., but can someone address my original questions. How
should I set up the drives?

 

[Bob Willard]

All great info., but can someone address my original questions. How
should I set up the drives?

NTFS is better, in almost all cases, than FAT. Fat is needed if you plan to
dual-boot and one of the OSs does not support NTFS.

Partitioning usually hurts performance, rather than helps, since switching
from one partition to another forces relatively long seeks; if you really
understand your access pattern, you may have reason to disagree. I suggest
partitioning only if you plan to backup some, but not all, files -- since it
is usually easier to backup an entire partition than to manually select
some files.

Encrypting folders hurts performance, and can hurt *a lot* when you forget
the password.

If your RAIDset is managed by hardware (not by the Win OS), then I don't
see that dynamic disks have any benefit.