I do a lot of video rendering. I have transfered my old VHS into MPG files and burned them onto DVD. I also do this on the side for frineds at a reasonaable price. My DVD buring sofware and burner are on a Shuttle AK38N MOBO with AMD 1.7 palamino overclocked to 1.83 with 1.0Gig or DDR memory. It appears my center socket for DDR is bad because whenever I try to install memory into it, my system reboots. When I use the left and the right slot, everything works fine. I have the FSB jumpered at 333mhz. (I just thought of that but my question is really about cleaning up my hard drive) I have an 80gig IEDE 7200 in my primary and a second 80gig IEDE 7200 in my 2nd computer networked peer to peer. MPG files take up aprox 1Gig each. I'm starting to fill up and exploring my best option for additional hard drive space. First I would like to get some partition and some effeciency ideas. I'm only using one partition on each harddrive. 1. Whats the best utility to partition my harddrive? I'm not very up to speed on NTFS, FAT32 and all that stuff. I do run disk defrag periodically. 2. In your opinion, what would be the right combination of price,effeciency,and storage to add additional hard drive space. It would be simple enough to add another IEDE as a slave. I've heard even firewire doesn't transfer fast enough over a network for real time processing from 2nd computer to primary computer unless you are using 10gig eithernet which isn't an option. Currently I cut and paste files from second computer to primary computer which isn't a problem. I like keeping my files on 2nd computer as the primary where I do my buring is the family box with "little fingers" playing simple games and a wife checking e-mail. 2nd computer is a decent 1.7 AMD that runs at 1.0 with 256 of DIMM memory. Take a shot at this one Skip and Ranchhand. Thanks !

yer using win XP home. i believe that OS will allows u to make partitions on the fly much like NT. use NTFS..better security and only that allows u to make partitions on the fly i believe. if not, just use fdisk. as per space. what ever cash u got determines yer space =-)

Which Palomino do you have? Do you have an XP1700+ (1.467 GHz) or an XP2100+ (1.733 GHz)? Both run with a normal bus speed of 266 MHz. Overclocking the system may be causing problems with the center memory slot. Have you tried running at normal speeds to see if that is the problem? It could also be the RAM. Some memory does not overclock well.

Kelbob, you use a 100MBit network ??? If yes that's your bottleneck because at ideal speed it's just able to let 12,5 MB/second through it (8 bit = 1 byte). If you need the new drive only to store the video on your second computer a 5400rpm drive will be fast enough. On the other hand a 7200rpm drive can be use everywhere later. That's totally up to you! About the prices take a calculator and see what 1GB cost's you in the different drives. Harddrives use costly hardware so that smaller drive tend to cost more per GB than bigger ones. Only the really big drives tend to cost more again. In feburary I bought a 120 GB 7200rpm drive because they had the best price per GB at that time. About the partitioning you can do it directly from XP. Use NTFS because it has the better handling of your drivespace!

hello useing fdisk will delete all data. partion magic and drive image will create partions.

You do ramble on Kelbob :-) Forget about partitioning. Add another large hard drive.

sorry about the rambling. I use the XP1700 1.47. And yes, the center slot did quit when I moved the jumper to 333.