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New Member
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 2/3/2004 4:03 AM
Posts: 3, Visits: 1 |
| Well I will be reinstalling XP some time this week and was wondering some of your opinions on the hard drive setup I should use. I have a WD 120GB SE 8MB Cache drive, WD 60GB 2MB Cache Drive, and a IBM 40GB 2MB Cache Drive.
My first thought was to use the 120gig drive for the system drive. Make it into a 15gig system drive, 2gig swap drive, then two 47gig storage partitions. Then use the 60gig drive in my USB 2.0 enclosure and the 40gig hooked up in ATA.
But then I was thinking how I would like to have all my MP3 and everything on my 120gig as the USB 2.0 drive. Mainly because I have 52gigs of legal MP3's including about 600 full albums that I have spent day and night ripping. Then use the 60gig drive as the system drive with the same 15gig system, 2gig swap, and the rest storage.
Mainly my question is will the 8MB cache on the 120gig drive really make that much difference? Anyone out there in the same position as me?
Also I have a 20gig spare drive and was wondering if anyone know of any good compression software that could get my 52GB or 38GB of MP3 onto this 20gig drive? I will be searching around for this also, but any advice is good advice. Thanks in advance.
MAtt
AMD Duron 1 GHz @1200
MSI K7T Turbo2
768MB PC133
MSI Geforce4 TI4400 32MB
IBM 40GB, WD 60GB,WD 120GB SE
600 CFM of air circulation
Dual Power Supplies 350w and 250w |
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Senior Forum Advisor
Group: Senior Advisor
Last Login: 7/14/2006 12:11 PM
Posts: 1,661, Visits: 191 |
| OK, that's one big chunck to swallow.... 
I wanna give you my opinion on this but I'd first like to know which drives are actually USB and which not; it sounds as if your 60GB one is a USB drive, and that you can choose whether to hook up the 120gigger as an ATA or a USB drive. I never knew these "dual purpose" drives existed.
Also, how much disk space do your current user files (minus the MP3 files) cough up?
This I can already say....
You will not get a performance boost by using an 8MB buffer drive for just playing MP3's. A drive like that is most useful for capturing of media, video editing, graphics editing, and music editing. You'll also notice a difference by using it as your system drive but this is less important unless you're not into capturing/editing.
You could, for example, use the 120GB drive as the system drive, rip audio onto one of its partitions, then move the audio files to your "MP3 storage drive" which could be your 60GB drive.
To answer another question of yours...
Since MP3 files are already compressed, you won't get them much smaller than they already are. In some cases, zipping them up will actually make them larger. For this reason, it's generally not recommended to put MP3's on a compressed drive or partition.
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