Hard Disk Scheme for max performance of new system?

Garry,

I think you won't go far wrong with that disk allocation. It adheres very well to the Keep It Simple strategy, and I think that counts for a lot.

Get it all installed and start having some fun!

A little article about Vista disk indexing HERE

Might well be worth a try.

Phil

Garry, don't forget to format your content drives using large cluster sizes for optimized streaming of large content files... I like 64K clusters. This means every individual file is at least 64K on disk, but for audio/video data you're not wasting any space compared to the efficiency you get for streaming...

Gerry, one simple method is to save a text file containing a single character, then right-click the file and look at the "size on disk" property.

Hi Keith,
By content drives are you refering to the drive where music will be written, or the drives where Sonar and the plugins are installed?

Thanks,
Randy

ORIGINAL: 91lespaulstandard
By content drives are you refering to the drive where music will be written, or the drives where Sonar and the plugins are installed?

The drive where audio content is read from/written to -- loop content, SONAR audio files, etc.

ORIGINAL: The Kiosk Project
each doc is precisely 10k each. Does this suggest, as I can imply from your previous reply, that the disks have been formatted to a cluster size of 10k?

10K? That would be an odd cluster size! Cluster sizes should be a number that is a power of 2 -- 4096 (4K), 8192 (8K), 16384 (16K)... up to 128K I believe. If you create a TXT file (e.g., using notepad) containing a single character, then pull up the properties of the file, the "size" should be "1 byte", and the "size on disk" will be whatever the disk's cluster size is.

If so, is it a known fact that increasing this to 64k will improve my disk streaming performance?

The theory is that a.) audio/video data ususally comes in large chunks -- you know, 100MB WAV files, etc., and b.) pulling more data off the disk per unit of work results in fewer overall disk accesses. The analogy is moving buckets of water from one sink to another -- smaller bucket means more trips to move the same quantity = more work for you.

I'm sure over the years faster + bigger disks with larger caches probably has lessened somewhat the advantages of larger cluster sizes for streaming, but it's something I've always done, so you can't convince me it doesn't make a difference!

You can google "cluster size performance" and decide for yourself... you'd really have to run some low-level benchmarks to see what, if any, real advantage you get. It really depends on your usage patterns (of course!). If you're streaming 60 audio tracks off of a 500GB SATAII drive, it's probably not going to make a huge difference that the audio files are stored in 8K clusters instead of 64K.

While we're at it, there are a couple of other optimizations that I do for NTFS (besides disabling indexing, metioned above)... namely, disabling 8.3 filenames and disabling "last access time". I think this article explains them:

http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2005/02/08/NTFS_Hacks.html