How should I set up 4 hardrives?

[dario03]

Once I get everything together I will have 1 10gig 5200rpm and 3 40gig 7200 hardrives. What would be the optimal way of setting those up for a computer mostly used for video editing and downloading?
Can I make some of the hardrives be recongnized as one or would I need raid for that?

 

[TheMajor]

You can create "spanned partitions" with windows xp PRO.

Are all drives IDE?
Do you want to use a CD-rom drive as well? Because most mobo's only have room for 4 IDE devices.

 

[DJ-CHRIS]

I think you would need a raid controller for that

I would set it up this way

40 Gig for windows C:\ SET TO MASTER IDE CHANNEL 0
10 gig for "video's" D:\ SET TO SLAVE IDE CHANNEL 0
40 gig for "video's" E:\ SET TO MASTER IDE CHANNEL 1
40 gig for "video's" F:\ SET TO SLAVE IDE CHANNEL 1

The last 3 drive's name's dont matter that much, but make sure your bootable drive is the C drive. An easy way to do this is to put a 40 gig in first and install windows, than add the rest.

 

[TheMajor]

I would set it up the same way.

 

[dario03]

Oh yeah I would only be able to use 3 of them since I will have a dvd-rw to. So now its just the 3 40gigs. What drive should I put the swap file on?
BTW its a win98se machine.

 

[TheMajor]

Put the swap file on the fastest drive.
You could buy an IDE controller for more HD's/CD-ROM's.

 

[Pilotwings119]

40 Gig for windows C:\ SET TO MASTER IDE CHANNEL 0
10 gig for "video's" D:\ SET TO SLAVE IDE CHANNEL 0
40 gig for "video's" E:\ SET TO MASTER IDE CHANNEL 1
40 gig for "video's" F:\ SET TO SLAVE IDE CHANNEL 1

yep i'd do it that way. i can't imagine having another hd... i already have a 250 gig maxtor.. dammnn... one day i'll have like a couple of terrabytes lol

 

[gsbtech]

The 10gb drive would make a good paper weight. How good is your power supply and cooling? Each of those hard drives is drawing around 15 watts. I wouldn't bother with the 10gb drive unless I was sure I needed it. It wouldn't be worth the cost of an IDE card. I'd burn that 10gb of extra data on 4 DVD's.

2000 pro and XP pro have built in software support for raid 0 and 1. I'd put my system on the first disk and stripe the second two disks for video....

 

[DJ-CHRIS]

If your using a DVD or CD-ROM replace the 10 gig drive with the CD-ROM or DVD.

This than shares your OS and your rarely needed cd-rom on one channel, increasing speed and stability

 

[waynejkruse10]

id buy a pci ide raid card and set it up like this:

2x 40gb as Raid 0 on Raid Card
1x 40gb as Primary Master (on Motherboard)
1x 10gb as Secondary Master
1x Optical Drive as Secondary Slave