Please help me set up my hard drive partitions

[ThaArtist]

I am using this computer for multiple things that normally people only have one computer for and I am somewhat convinced partitioning will help me but I need help. Or maybe just separate hard drives.

This computer will be used for:

- a small home recording studio. (business)
- graphic design & multimedia projects (business)
- some gaming
- Running windows 7 x64

My specs aren't amazing but good enough for now (I want to upgrade vid card and another 4gb of ram just because of huge plugins vsts and wave files etc.):
GPU: ASUS EN9600GSO/DI/512MD3/V2 GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card
PSU: PC Power and Cooling Silencer PPCS370X 370W ATX12V 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply
HD: Western Digital Caviar Black WD6401AALS 640GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 620 Propus 2.6GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Processor ADX620WFGIBOX
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-MA770T-UD3P AM3 AMD 770 ATX AMD Motherboard
Ram: G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F3-10666CL9D-4GBPK

So far for recording projects and VSTs etc it's good to have a folder closest to the Hard drive so I have C:\_MusicStudio

There's no telling how big that area could get though with projects that could contain lots and lots of wave files. I know my 640GB HD isnt that much and am willing to buy maybe another terabyte if needed.

What advice can you give me?

My Photoshop CS3 loads realistically in 6 seconds so I'm not sure if a SSD would benefit me much for WIndows and programs and I really could only afford one for around $100.

What do you recommend in terms of SSD for WIN7 and programs and or what conflicts better or worse with partitioning the hard drive for other projects?

If I'm running Pro Tools on the SSD and store all my projects on the 640GB Western Digital will that cause any issues?

[judge56988]

I have 2 hdd's:

The first drive is 640GB and is divided into 3 partitions -
First is 60GB for OS and Applications
Second is 20GB for OS, Mediacruise and Adobe Premiere only with all unneeded services including internet turned off. This helps to avoid dropped frames when capturing video.
Third is the rest of the drive for My Docs and data.

The second drive is 1.5TB and has one partition of 1TB which only contains backups of the partitions on the 640GB drive whilst the remainder is used as a scratch drive for premiere and photoshop plus any other odd stuff that is not going to be kept. Reading from one drive and writing to another speeds things up a bit.

Everything is also backed up to another external hard drive.

I'm sure others here know far more about such things than I do but this works for me and is simple enough to implement.

There is a good guide to partitioning here.

[ThaArtist]

Yeah I've read to run two OS's for each task at hand. One for recording studio and one for designing... but what about gaming? and use a totally separate HD for all file storage. What the file storage HD work with both OS's? A bit confusing and I dont want to buy another win7x64 pro key.

[judge56988]

Yeah I've read to run two OS's for each task at hand. One for recording studio and one for designing... but what about gaming? and use a totally separate HD for all file storage. What the file storage HD work with both OS's? A bit confusing and I dont want to buy another win7x64 pro key.

Gaming would be on your "everyday" OS partition, used for internet etc.
I would think that your "work" applications could all be on the second partition OS - I think the main thing is to get rid of all the unnecessary background processes that tie up memory and can cause problems, like with dropped frames. Also if this partition does not have an internet connection set up you don't need an anti virus programme running in the background and you don't get bothered by applications wanting to update themselves all the time. I'm no expert and others may have better ideas (and a better way of explaining them) than me! Most of what I know has been learnt by picking the brains of the computer boffins I work with, I'm more of a nuts and bolts man myself.

The two OS's can see all the data partitions/hdd's without any problems. When you fire up the computer you get a screen asking you which OS you want to boot to, you can set the default OS and a time delay in seconds for you to chose which one you want before it boots to the default. See here.

As far as paying for two windows keys goes, I had no problem installing the same copy of XP onto two different hdd's on the same PC. Whether it's 100% legal or not I don't know - they are both on the same computer after all so...

[ThaArtist]

Great great advice.... thank you thank you! If I can get away with the same key for both OS's thats def what I'm going to do.

Can I get away with this method with one ssd and one Hdd ?

Or maybe two smaller ssd's for the os's and softwares for each primary tasks and then one HDD for data storage partitioned for graphic/multimedia design and one for the recording studio projects/vsts?

What would be better or more cost efficient. At this point I would like to not buy anything but if it will help not crash programs etc im all for it... I barely get a program crash but I know it can happen.... I cant recall anytime with this system i built that ive had one software crash so i dunno...

that link you posted is for dual booting xp but im sure alot of it still pertains to win7 x64 so im gonna read it anyway and research more in win7 dual booting.

[judge56988]

I don't have an SSD or W7 so I can't help you there.
Also, maybe these days with fast multi core cpu's and 4GB RAM being commonplace, the programme crashing is not so much of an issue. I do however like the way a computer runs when there is the absolute minimum of background services running - it just feels cleaner and more responsive. You're also pretty sure not to have any virus issues or malware on your workstation partition if you're not downloading games and free trial software etc.
In an industrial environment the whole computer/workstation would more than likely be restricted to running only the specific applications required for the task in hand.