Hi, i finally got a reasonable computer (8GB DDR3; Phenom II x4) after dealing with my wife's 8 year-old gateway (256MB; Pentium) for years. I'm finally ready to delve into some serious production work. I'm using Cubase, Live and/or Reason primarily. I've read a bit about how setting up partitions to seperate operating system from samples, sound clips, etc can help overall performance. I also notice that in windows 7 you an easily set-up VHDs. I'm just wondering if thats the same thing as a partiation. if not, is it better or worse than a partition? Is it really neccasary to do it either way? Also, it's already seperated into two drives - FACTORY_IMAGE which has about 12GB available to it, and is pre-loaded with about 10 of those GB's and the C: drive which has the remaining 900GBs. Does that mean that it is already set-up into two partitions, or should samples, etc. still be on a seperate drive (or virtual drive...). Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
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AFAIK VHDs are noticably slower to write data onto, until you ha
AFAIK VHDs are noticably slower to write data onto, until you have filled the drive (or until all the space the VHD can occupy has been allocated on the physical disk).
Even once it has all been allocated it's still marginally slower (Windows has to pass the hard disk writes through a whole extra layer first).
So odds are it'll be worse (performance wise).
No it isn't the same. For recording purpose you will want a phy
No it isn't the same. For recording purpose you will want a physically separate hard drive for a secondary. This could be firewire, usb, or an internal. This sounds like a desktop machine so I'd recommend installing a second internal SATA 3 hard drive for a recording audio/video destination.
The factory image is your built in restore discs that they no longer send to you. If you delete this you will not be able to make the machine factory new again. For hard corps geeks this isn't an issue because they don't like factory installs. For the average home user you would lose all the preinstalled software and licensing that came with the computer. I'd recommend leaving it untouched especially since you have plenty of space anyway.
A virtual disk is not a separate partition though shares some similarities. A partition of the same physical drive as the operating system doesn't get you anywhere but more bunched up. What virtual does get you is the ability to run Virtual Machines which include the new XP Mode. Mac has been doing this for years with Bootcamp etc.
I have not yet run across any program or interface that requires XP Mode. Even the Mackie Onyx interface works-though it is even pickier about firewire cards than under XP.