Pc Specifications

[FlyingPenguin]

I wouldn't necessarily write off a 120+Gb drive so easily. Of course I NEVER use one partition on a drive like that. My 160 is in 8 partitions.

If a drive is going to fail on you, doesn't matter if it's an 80 or a 120. Granted using two 60s instead of 120 halves your risk, but hopefully everyone here does regular backups.

[MAC]

I agree with the others, 1 GB of RAM is more than enough. Also, the 3,2 GHz CPU is super expensive. Why not get a 2.4 GHz and overclock it to 3.0 (or higher)? Also, i see no mention of a monitor.

MAC

[chottoED]

I'd swap the following:

ASUS V9950 GeForce FX 5900 Video Card -> Radeon 9800 or AIW 9700 Pro - the FX is crap compared to Radeons for the money

Canon i950 Photo Printer -> I850, still high quality prints and blazing fast also for less money

Not quite sure you actually need 4GB of memory unless your Photoshop or AutoCAD. 1GB is the good number for now and 2GB if you want bragging rights.

As for your Sony DVD+RW, you may want to check out DVD+/-RW drives... the standards are still fighting it out and it'd be good to be able to use either one should they finally decide who won (DVD-RW is winning out). Also I'm not sure if you really need a regular CDROM drive since you've already the DVD writer. DVD-ROM drives are about the same price anyways so if you really do want a drive only for reads, a Toshiba would be a good choice as they're the most quiet drives I've ever used.

[canton_kid]

How does one back up a 260 gig?

And even partitioned into smaller area, you still lose everything if the drives crashes unreadleable right.

One of the reasons I like smaller large drives personally. Cheaper (I like about $100), faster to defrag, easier to back up to a different drive or ghost, and if one goes out they don't all go out
I remember those old Chirstmas lights still, one goes out they all go out, you lose the whole string at once! Kinda my thought on one gaint drive with like 40gig partitions. The hole drive fries and you lose em all.

I'd buy 2 of the 260gig if you get em and either run raid so you always have a copy, or at least use the second to store the ghost images of the first main drive

Also, dumb question probably, but I just did my first ghost restore last night and it was much faster than I expected.
So,
Would it be faster to ghost a drive, delete the drive, then restore the ghost than to defrag the drive?
Just wondering, it seems if you deleted the drive and restored the ghost then it would be defraged afterwards anyway. I don't remember how long it took to make that ghost, but restore was Fast!
Course it would probably also depend on the anount of fragnemtation on the drive, mine are normally pretty much!

SO I 'd go with 1gig or 2gig ram, and 2 or more Hard drives, CD burner and DVD burner both. DVD burners are like 16x cd burners (the ones I looked at) so if your gonna burn CDs I'd get a 52X burner. Maybe also run a DVD drive for $50 also incase you wanna make direct copies of a DVD.
Maybe toss in a promise controller card to run all the extra drives if the system board only handles 4 well

[FlyingPenguin]

Disadvantages of using several smaller drives: more noise, more power, more heat. Also I've found that the big drives are more cost effective. Hard to find a 60Gb for less than $100, but you can often find a 120gb or 160gb for $125 - $150 on sale or with a rebate.

Noise is becoming a BIG issue for me. My old system was VERY noisy. This new system was built ground up with noise supression in mind.

And even partitioned into smaller area, you still lose everything if the drives crashes unreadleable right.

There are some real good reasons why you should use several small partitions instead of one or two big ones: damage control, ease of backup, ease of repair.

Although there's nothing that will save your data if you suffer a massive hard drive crash, most disk corruption is usually a soft corruption of the FAT (File Allocation Table) or index (used by NTFS). If you have one big partition then a trashed FAT/index will put all your data at risk. By segregating everything into smaller partitions, you limit the damage to only the one partition that suffered the FAT/index damage - it won't affect any others as long as it's not a large physical disk crash, or an electronics failure.

Another benefit is it's a hell of a lot faster to scandisk and defrag smaller partitions.

If you work with editing video, it's a good idea to make a big empty partition just for storing AVIs you're editing. When you're done with the project, instead of defragging the drive you just delete all the files off of it (no need to defrag an empty drive) and you're ready for the next project.

You can also segregate your data to make backups easier.

Here's how my workstation is partitioned:


I have WinXP in it's own partition. Nothing else is installed in that partition except the OS.

All my apps are ALL installed in the D partition partitions (I do NOT install ANY apps in the OS partition! If the app's installer allows me an option to change the default install path I always install it in the D partition). Some things will still go into the OS partition that you can't help (Office for instance puts all the common DLL files in the same partition as the OS), so the OS partition WILL grow slowly over time - you need to leave enough room for that. You also want enough room for your swap file.

Games ONLY go in one of the three game partitions. The Temp partition is for downloads, IE & netscape caches, Winzip extract folder, etc.

The Scratch partition is for temp storage of files to be burned on a Cd-R, or DVD-R, storing large files like Ghost images, client projects and drive images, and temp files for apps that need a LOT of temp storage (like Photoshop).

The Video partition is used only for video editing and storing video files.

All my data (and I mean EVERYTHING) is located on the data partition: Documents folder, client web pages, favorites folder, Outlook user files & address book (it's easy to change the default location for your Outlook Express folders and address book), and any data files from apps that don't use the My Documents folder. This makes it obscenely easy to backup my data weekly - I just Ghost the whole data partition.

To make a backup of the system for easy recovery in case of a serious HDD crash, I use Norton Ghost
to make an image of my OS, Apps and Data partitions. I used to put the image files on 3 or 4 CD-Rs but now I burn them to a single DVD-R.

In my case I also backup my data files to a server and to a pocket USB Compact Flash memory stick daily (love those things), but it's a no-brainer to just make a Ghost image of the whole data partition on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis.

I don't bother making a ghost image of anything else - games are easy to re-install, the temp partition has nothing important, and the scratch partitions are just temporary stuff. Anything important like client Ghost images gets burned (I never ghost directly to a CD or DVD - it's MUCH faster to ghost to another partition and then burn it later).

I carry these Ghost images, the latest data backup, my OS install CD as well as CD-R copies of all the important apps I need in a small CD valise in my briefcase. In an emergency I can restore my stuff to a new hard drive, or even a different computer, and be up and running in an hour or two. It's saved my bacon twice already.

[zandor]

Instead of 4 gigs of ram ($$$$$), I'd definately get SCSI, dual CPUs, or both.
4x1GB is like $1200. 2x512 is 200, 4x512 is 400, and that's for reg'd ECC.
Unless you're doing hardcore photoshop or something I'd get 1-2GB and use the other $800 for Xeons, mad SCSI, or a SCSI boot drive and 2 nice AMD MPs (or in my case, modded XP 2500+ chips.)
Actually, my dual 2500+ chips & mobo is cheaper than a 3.2 & mobo. Mine are at 2.1GHz on stock voltage & "prime95 stable".

[canton_kid]

Fp,
That looks like a great system you have there, but aren't you running out of letters? Only 26 right
Just Joking of course.

I am starting to do something like that myself. Though I am still using my 60gig - 100gig drives for it.
On my play and test system I have W2k installed on a 2gig drive by itself and then everything else is installed on 2 partitions on the slave drive. Not something I use alot, so it's working with the 2gig for now pretty good.

My main box still has the master drive with all the stuff, (haven't done a re-install lattely to change it)
But I have 2 partitions on the slave drive. One for video editing and one for storing ghosts of the master drive plus a few other things.

Your advice does not fall on deaf ears
Most of the changes in the way I been setting stuff up are from your suggestions, and others.

For some reason right now I don't feel safe with one big 250gig drive though and would prefer 2 120gigs instead. I guess that cause I could store a ghost of a drive on the other drive and be safe if either one totally fried. Probably because of all the stuff I lost when a 1 gig totally crashed, and when I had to RMA a 13gig and lost stuff. Course that was before ghost and they were new LARGE drives then. My how things change
At the time CD burners and DVD burners weren't common place either like they are now, so I didn't have good backups of those Large drives. I geuss I should start doing backups on the DVD RWs now too. Not used to having those 4.7gig disks yet I guess. It would save alot of space if I burned the ghosts to disks
I have one partition storing the ghosts for 4 systems, duh, each ghost would pretty much fit on one DVD rw and free up close to 15gigs, maybe more total!

Also, about 4 gigs ram being a waist, I just upgraded my main box from 768 to 1 gig, I see no performance increase so far though all I really have done is author a few DVDs from mpeg2 I captured.
Authored exact same full disk with 768mb in 14 minutes 14 seconds, with 1 gig it was 14 minutes and 24 seconds. Looks like the crucial 2100 512 stick slowed me down 10 seconds
Just think how slow I'd be with 4 gigs, ha ha
Actually 10 seconds could be anything, and I might have been running 2700 with 768, then the 2100 512 stick could have caused it too.

Watch those shopping cart part numbers. I am sure I clicked the link to buy 2700, but after getting 2100 delivered I checked the numbers and it shows on the receipt part numbers for 2100. I saved the order page to the hardrive
But I would have never ordered 2100 for only $2 less on purpose!! SO I geuss latter I'll use it in a different system and buy 2700 or faster.