Sijun Forums :: View topic

provis · junior member Member # Joined: 13 May 2003 Posts: 6

hi everyone,

I would like to create a new partition for my scratchdisk. Thing is, i'll most probably create a new partition from my Drive D, which has about 2 gb of space left: - would any data be erased if a new partition is created?

thanks!

ceenda · member Member # Joined: 27 Jun 2000 Posts: 2030

Heya.

Partition Magic can resize partitions which still have data on them. In general, you should _always_ back up stuff before resizing partitions, but people tend to give Partition Magic good reviews.

Also, I notice alot of people partition one drive and set scratch disks to different partitions on that one drive. I'm not really sure why people do that. I always assumed it was good to have scratch discs on seperate drives because the drive needles work independantly instead of having to jump across the place spanning partitions on one drive.

Anyhoo, good luck.

provis · junior member Member # Joined: 13 May 2003 Posts: 6

thanks for replying.. Very Happy

I don't have Partition Magic but i think Acronis should do just as well Razz

I'm more concerned about keeping the data really Razz

As for specifying scratchdisks on other partitions, I'm equally clueless too. Perhaps someone would like to explain?

-prov

B0b · Posted: Tue May 13, 2003 4:09 am

Partition Magic is ideal for ppl who have 1 HDD and don't have the time to back everything up and start fresh using FDisk..

generally the middle - end of your drive will be the fastest (due to it being on the inner part of the spindle)

seperate drives is all well and good if your on SCSI but with IDE - your drive is only as fast as the slowest drive on the cable -ie if you have an old drive (12Mb/s) grouped with a new drive (28Mb/s) your gonna b stuck @ 12Mb/s so it won't make any difference where u put the scratch..

your best bet for cheap performance boost is to go with an IDE RAID system 2x7200 RPM drives on a RAID 0 config with an ATA100/133 RAID controller will give you 80Mb/s Performace Smile

(make sure u back up vital data often with RAID 0 - cos if 1 drive dies you've got a long hard slog to try and recover data - in most cases ur stuffed)

BadMange · junior member Member # Joined: 24 Sep 2002 Posts: 31

B0b has some good suggestions, but there's a work-around for the slow through-put of old drives with new drives. My ASUS mobo has two IDE channels (current mobo's usually do), so I configured them this way:
IDE Ch 1: 120GB HDD (Master), ATAPI CD-RW (Slave)
IDE CH2: 4GB HDD (Master)

The 120GB drive has 3 partitions; System, Storage, Downloads. The old 4GB drive has 1 partition; Scratch disk. By putting the drives on separate IDE channels, you won't run into the slower through-put problems. (My info is backed up by an HD Tach benchmark to make sure I'm not talking out of my ass... Smile

)

-Bad Mange
_________________
Have a bad mange!

B0b · Posted: Wed May 14, 2003 12:48 am

arg! get that CDR off of CH1 and put it with the older drive!!! Smile

BadMange · junior member Member # Joined: 24 Sep 2002 Posts: 31

Why? Please explain your reasoning for this...

-Bad Mange
_________________
Have a bad mange!

B0b · Posted: Wed May 14, 2003 9:47 am

leave ur fastest channel clear for doing fast things Smile

liv the fish · Posted: Thu May 15, 2003 7:09 am

Nice info! I had no idea. So, what do you have to do to make both drives masters? Is it just switch the jumpers and the cables or am I totally off (do you have to switch the jumpers at all)? Thanks and sorry for my total lack of hardware knowledge Smile

Darn Graphic Arts school needs to teach more hardware.

Thanks,
Brian
_________________
*This space for sale*

B0b · Posted: Fri May 16, 2003 12:35 am

to make ur drive master - slave - cable select its a case of looking on the top of ur drive (this is usually where the information is for changing the jumper settings) and move ur jumper accordingly.. out of the box drives are usually set to master @ the factory..

BadMange · junior member Member # Joined: 24 Sep 2002 Posts: 31

B0b-

Took your advice and put the CDR as IDE Ch2 Master and Scratch Disk as IDE Ch2 Slave. What exactly is "Cable Select" used for? I have my WD 120GB HDD set as IDE Ch1 CS. Should I leave as is, or change to Master? It's the only drive on IDE Ch1.

-Bad Mange
_________________
Have a bad mange!

Ragnarok · Posted: Tue May 20, 2003 1:46 pm

If you're using winxp it has a quite powerful built in partition manager and it's pretty similar to partition magic.
_________________
"Ever forward, my darling wind." -Master Yuppa
Seigetsu

B0b · Posted: Wed May 21, 2003 3:53 am

ok cable select is for those who want to just put the drive in and not have to think about master or slave...

i.e:

|motherboard|=======ide cable====|slave|======|master|

now if you didn't know which part of the cable was which - then u'd stick it on cable select and let the drive decide..

yes the NT family of OS has its own Hard Drive manager - but this can't make a partition out of an already existing formatted drive like partition magic can.. it can only deal with non-formatted drives, otherwise u loose all ur partition tables and as a result will loose the information on that drive/partition

cheney · Posted: Sat May 24, 2003 8:31 pm

Read this essay I wrote.

Here is a guide to hardware when considering creating digital art with intention to print. Many painters tend to disagree with me about everything digital, but just about all those digital painters who are not pros tend to have their heads up their ass when it comes to anything technical. To compliment this post I have spoken with Dr. McCalpin a few times for extreme technical alternatives. He is thought to be the world leader for memory bandwidth system design.

Logos are best created as vector images. Vector images are upward scalable without quality loss, so pixel size is not relevent. As a result the image does not have to be large to print at high quality if its vector.

If its a raster based image creation system you plan to implement then you need a super badass memory bandwidth system. A raster image is any 2D image format that maps image data to pixel units across a bitmap. Basicly, a pixel is a single unit of image data containing a single color written in one of various RGB (Red Green Blue) color formats. These pixels are then spread across a rectangular grid in a color pattern representing your image.

In other words a raster image is any image that is 2D and not vector. Its just about everything digital you will ever look at. The internet only displays raster images.

So, why the hell would you need a good computer for raster images? Before I can answer this question I am going to barely tap the surface of digital printing.

When printing an image from a standard program (such as MS Word, or Internet Explorer) the image will be printed at 72dpi without any regard to image data or image size. This is why professional print jobs come out of professional software. Pro print software is really cheap, and it does alot of magic, but its also worthless if you have a great raster image software such as Photoshop or Painter.

Anyways, a pro print software package will allow the user to specific the size of the print from a specified image. The specified image will have a set image size. You can try to make the image look larger by upsizing it, but it will look like crap. It will become foggy and blurry to compensate for extreme pixelation. To better understand pixelation think back to the blocky characters of the first Nintento games. You can try to create a large print from a small image, but this will create very noticable pixelation. Since you cannot create large prints from small images or make small images larger the only way to create high quality large prints is to start from a large image.

By large I don't mean kinda big. I really mean insanely huge like comparing an apple to the Astro Dome (largest dome in the world at the time of its creation, and the first dome created larger than the Pantheon in Rome). Print quality is measured in DPI (dots per inch). Logically there could be a DPCM (dots per centimeter), but nobody uses it. DPI defines the quality of a print, because it means the amount of pixel image units per one inch of print space.

The lowest quality of print commonly used is standard text printing, which defaults to 72dpi. This resolution is just large enough to fully utilize anti-aliasing to text characters, so that the characters print out smoothly like on your screen rather than pixelated and blockly like they were typically designed. Text is typically black and white and contains no image data except for the text characters. Keep in mind that generally text characters will print fine no matter how somebody fucks up their settings because text files are vector images.

Any print where image data is concerned is a whole new world of complexity. For smaller prints such as CD jewelcase covers and smaller the minimum standard for a pro print is 600dpi. This means a 6inch by 6inch cd jewel cover should be created as a 3600x3600px image before printing without any upsizing. For most people that is just insanly huge, but really its only the tip of the ice burg. Keep in mind that CD jewel cases are not very large.

Now imagine a standard sized movie poster. That is a print sized at 20x30inches. For larger images it is acceptable to let detail slide, because our mind tells us to look less closely for details on larger areas due to how our minds configure visual input for processing perception. So, lets say a poster is a great print at 300dpi. The math results in an image that needs to be created at 6000x9000 pixels. This is starting to get pretty large. If you consider all the layer and channel data that goes into making an image at this size in Photoshop will be lucky to get a PSD smaller than 100mb.

What most people don't consider is that PSD size is not really the true image size. PSD is one of the greatest compression and data packing algorithms on the planet due to how it configures layers into a saved package. The open image will consume anywhere between 2 to 20 times this amount of space. Lets say your final PSD image is around 650mb, then when the project is open its really taking up anywhere from 1300mb to 13gb.

Now, to answer the hardware question. How are you going to move more than 1gb of data around for processing? Luckily the program will only task what it needs, so its a bit more efficient than you might think, but not much. If you request data that is not currently in memory then you must sit and wait for data to transfer from hard disk to ram. This takes alot of time and creates alot of headaches.

Now consider that most ram is not very fast. Its much faster than hard drive access, but compared to cpu cache memory ram is like a stick in the mud. Even if all your data is in memory you will still have to wait for data transfers from ram to cache.

So, you need a system that contains my ideal memory configuration. An extremely high bandwidth memory, and alot of it. Current AMD and Intel cpus can only task up to 4gb of memory. The rest is either unread or operating at retarted levels as a pagefile. In addition to this Windows only allows 2gb of memory to be allocated to each process (3gb with a hack to WinXP Pro). So, that is why you set 4gb (or less, but not less than 1.5gb) as ram. The rest of the memory you load a ramdisk. A ramdisk is software that loads a filesystem image onto memory so that memory operates as an additional harddrive. Data stored in a ramdisk will be lost when the system reboots, but if its going to be used as primary scratch disk that does not matter. Current Intel MCHs(memory controller hub, the chipset that runs the motherboard) allow up to 16gb of maximum memory. This should be enough for most users.

I have explained the benefits of having a large amount of memory, but I have not touched the speed concepts of memory. While having enough ram to store all your PSD data in memory rather than harddrive is nice, its simply not nice enough. It still takes time to move these mountains of data across the motherboard from memory to CPU. The time it takes is ultimately dependant upon two factors. The first is CPU cache size and the second is peak memory bandwidth speed of the motherboard's MCH.

In the following paragraphs I will be talking about mainstream CPU systems by brandname. Please note that I am only talking about SMP (Simultaneous Mult-Processing; more than 1 CPU on the same motherboard) capable systems.

Currently Intel is taking the greatest lead as far as memory bandwidth on smaller systems. Intel has smoked the hell out of AMD as far as memory bandwidth is concerned since its faulty i820 chipset a few years ago. This has driven AMD to leap forward with a 64bit CPU that is fully backwards compatible to 32bit instruction. This new CPU, Opteron, is designed to be at its most powerful with a 64bit operating instruction. This chip is vastly superior in memory tests compared to previous AMD chips, but is still a tad bit behind newest Intel systems. Intel's newest chipset has not been released yet for its Xeon CPU line, but it will feature a peak bandwidth of 6.4gbps blowing all AMD systems away.

With Opteron AMD is going to be moving up to a large 1gb cache size over its tiny 256mb compared to its previous CPUs. Intel has long been superior in this arena as well having a 512mb cache on all its Xeon chips since September 2002 and on its P4 since December 2002. To combat the Opteron Intel is going to release a 3.06ghz Xeon with 1gb cache that should compete quite well. What one chip has in bit path width the other makes up in with a nearly doubled clockspeed. Both of these chips are currently planned for release around $700mb.

Those are just the cheap systems for us small time artists. Intel also has chips called Xeon MP designed to be running in a quad processor configuration on SystemWorks brand MCH (GC-HE chipset to be exact with constant updated bios and bus revisions to compensate for increased memory bandwidth designs). These CPUs are very expensive, but feature up to a 6mb L3 cache with current 4.267gbps memory bandwidth. This high memory bandwidth and large CPU cache size makes for an awesome data transfer system. Consider that if you have 4 CPUs on a board is really 24mb of total cached instruction for the CPUs. As far as memory bandwidth the best in the world currently is the IBM 690 system capable of up to 16.4gbps of memory bandwidth and 32 CPUs. There is a whitepaper available to the public on the IBM website written in part by Dr. McCalpin.

At any rate when you are dealing with a block of data larger than 2gb you need to strongly consider options for highest possible data bandwidth. Otherwise you will find yourself waiting on a memory refresh and data transfer like using data off a floppy drive (I am really not exaggerating with that example).

I hope this explains more than you ever wanted to know about raster hardware limitations for print.
_________________
http://prettydiff.com/

B0b · Posted: Tue May 27, 2003 1:06 am

spooge demon · Posted: Tue May 27, 2003 3:05 am

http://h18002.www1.hp.com/alphaserver/technology/mem-bandwidth.html

Interesting addition to Cheneys points, with ref to McCalpin's work

most info I can find is very out of date.

cheney · Posted: Tue May 27, 2003 6:42 am

600dpi is very large indeed. This requires alot of zooming in and out to verify details on the actual pixel zoom to verifing composition by zooming all the way out.

Photoshop allows users to open images in a "new window". This means you can have the same image opened in two different windows, and changes to one window dynamicly reflect in the other window. The idea view space I have seen is to use 2 21in flat panel CRT monitors in a dual monitor configuration set at highest resolution. Then the image can be open in a window on one screen all the way zoomed in, and open in the other screen completely zoomed out. This, of course, requires a video card capable of dual monitor output, but most modern high power monitors are capable of such.
_________________
http://prettydiff.com/

B0b · Posted: Tue May 27, 2003 11:38 pm

when i say screen i mean the little dots when u print using offset litho - not ur monitor..

cheney · Posted: Wed May 28, 2003 1:02 pm

Ah, I see. I am not sure. A friend of mine who goes by Spot runs a print company in Dallas called DAPrints. I print all my stuff through him.
_________________
http://prettydiff.com/

eyalyab · Posted: Fri May 30, 2003 4:21 pm

what do i need to be able to print something say the size of a 100 dollar bill =]

Aaron · junior member Member # Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 40

"seperate drives is all well and good if your on SCSI but with IDE - your drive is only as fast as the slowest drive on the cable -ie if you have an old drive (12Mb/s) grouped with a new drive (28Mb/s) your gonna b stuck @ 12Mb/s so it won't make any difference where u put the scratch.. " - Bob

Actually, this isn't the case anymore (although I didn't realize it either until just recently). It turns out that the majority of chipsets released since 97 have supported Independent Device Timing, "which allows devices to run at different speeds and transfer modes while sharing a cable, without the slowest device on the cable knocking down the "mode" to the transfer rate of the slowest device". - Toejam31 (A great thread on the subject)

B0b · Posted: Wed Jun 11, 2003 11:51 pm

wow i stand corrected..

just got to make sure ur hardware prefs are set to DMA then..

tbone28 · Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2003 12:51 am

Putting slower drives (4 gig) with faster drives (120 gig) - (I can assume this based on the drive size because the technology) is only important depending on what Ultra DMA you end up using. If you choose PIO with the 4 gig and it is sharing the channel with the 120 then you will get a performance decrease.

DMA does wonders for speed of the system. It stands for Direct Memory Access. This allows the drive to bypass the CPU and write directly to memory. Freeing up CPU time and giving the CPU the chance to get the info from a faster source (memory) rather than the drive.

If you put a CD Rom on the same channel as a drive, well depending how old your CD Rom is expect to see a performance decrease.

Bottom line, creating new partitions for your stracth disk is worthless as it is all on the same drive. You need it on a different drive (volume)

I have a RAID setup so...........buh yah!
_________________
Consciousness: That annoying time between naps.

B0b · Posted: Wed Jun 18, 2003 1:22 am

SCSI or IDE RAID? Smile

tbone28 · Posted: Wed Jun 18, 2003 4:12 am

I am doing it IDE style. Software RAID 0 Striping. Just a simple no redundency two disk setup.
_________________
Consciousness: That annoying time between naps.

B0b · Posted: Wed Jun 18, 2003 7:09 am

how often u backup ur stuff?

tbone28 · Posted: Wed Jun 18, 2003 9:21 am

I work in I/S so... oh crap forget it, I was trying to legitimize me being a computer geek but I can't.

Hi my name it Tone and I have 5 pc's at home.

"Hi, Tone"

Anyway, I have a server that holds all my stuff. I just use an offline folder linked to my server for working purposes. I have alot of profile stuff happening. That way, if my computer crashes I have a back up. Now my server I try and back up regularly. I was thinking about setting up a Dfs (Distributed File Sharing) but I just have not got to it.
_________________
Consciousness: That annoying time between naps.