Best non-raid hard drive setup

Magic Man · 27 Jul 2007 at 23:31

Looking to build a new system and thinking of the best way to setup the drives and partitions.

With regards the page file, would it be best to have it on a different drive from the games drive and OS drive with both game and OS on the same drive (different partitions)

Or would having games/programs on the same drive as OS cause any issues, i.e. when playing a game does the system need to access any OS files as such so that having the OS on a different drive from the game is beneficial - in which case you're looking at putting the OS, games/programs and the page file over three distinct drives...

doctoe2260 · 28 Jul 2007 at 00:09

Ideally, anything you want to do fast needs it's own channel (easy with SATA).
For example, my new rig (if I ever get around to building it...) will wave 1 IDE interface which can support 2 drives, but I'll only have a smallish (40-60GB) drive on it which will take the OS. NOTHING else will be on this drive as then I can produce a drive image and repair any major difficulties quickly and painlessly without having to re install windows.
I will then have my 400GB SATA drive partitioned in to two volumes - 1 for games/programs and 1 for video editing/encoding. Ideally I want 2 physical drives, using 2 SATA channels so that accessing one partition won't slow down access to the other (a drive can only read one bit at a time (obviously)). In theory, if the rest of your rig is fast enough, having the two separate drives for this would allow video encoding to take place at the same time as gaming, without noticeable slowdown in either!

Hessian · 28 Jul 2007 at 10:36

I'm going to have mine setup as below:

1 x 40-60GB for the OS
1 x 250GB For Gaming and Software
1 x 250GB For Media and Documents

Magic Man · 28 Jul 2007 at 11:33

Thanks.

But where then is the best place to put the page file. On the same drive as the OS but suffer potential performance hits during Windows use or on the same drive as the games/programs and suffer potential performance hits during game/program use.

...or on a third drive?

Hence me wondering whether putting all games/applications/OS on the same drive and therefore using a second drive for the pagefile (and other files etc.) would be a better use of a two drive system.

TheVoice · 28 Jul 2007 at 12:14

doctoe2260 said:
Ideally, anything you want to do fast needs it's own channel (easy with SATA).
For example, my new rig (if I ever get around to building it...) will wave 1 IDE interface which can support 2 drives, but I'll only have a smallish (40-60GB) drive on it which will take the OS. NOTHING else will be on this drive as then I can produce a drive image and repair any major difficulties quickly and painlessly without having to re install windows.

It'd be better to have your OS on a faster drive though - a small IDE drive isn't going to be particularly quick.

Magic Man · 28 Jul 2007 at 20:56

So what would be the recommendation.

OS on one drive
Games/Programs on another drive
Documents/files etc. and pagefile on another drive?

If so, what drives/size recommended.

Or would just two drives be okay?

If so, would it be better to have the pagefile on the same drive as the OS or on the same drive as the games/programs...?

b0rn2sk8 · 29 Jul 2007 at 03:15

The way i normally set it up is,

Drive 1, Partition 1
OS+Games
Drive 1 Partition 2
Storage (Music, Video's etc)
Drive 2 Partition 1 (small 10-12gb)
Documents + Page file
Drive 2 Partition 2
Storage (Music, Video's etc)

Got an external for backups aswell as DVD's for real important stuff.

Mansize_tissue · 30 Jul 2007 at 16:36

If you have multiple, non-raided hard drives, i'd put a page file on every one.

C64 · 31 Jul 2007 at 20:52

Best for me has always been
os and games software on 1 drive no partition but a big drive
every download and winrar use etc etc is done on
a slave drive and never delete or download things on c:
as for page file i have never seen any improvement from having it on
any drive but the master

Pilgrim57 · 1 Aug 2007 at 11:26

Mansize_tissue said:
If you have multiple, non-raided hard drives, i'd put a page file on every one.

WHY!?

Try to have the OS on fastest drive with only 200MB page files - some progs/games don't like it if PF can't be found on C.
2nd drive create a separate 4GB partition for the PF only that way it doesn't become fragmented.

Mansize_tissue · 1 Aug 2007 at 14:02

Pilgrim57 said:
WHY!?

Try to have the OS on fastest drive with only 200MB page files - some progs/games don't like it if PF can't be found on C.
2nd drive create a separate 4GB partition for the PF only that way it doesn't become fragmented.

If some programs don't like it if the page file can't be found one the C: drive, then why make such a small page file on it; wouldn't you want a larger one on it?

I still think it's best to have a page file on every physical drive because, that way, information can be stored in the page file on whatever drive which is being used less.

Magic Man · 2 Aug 2007 at 12:17

Mansize_tissue said:
I still think it's best to have a page file on every physical drive because, that way, information can be stored in the page file on whatever drive which is being used less.

But how does it know which file to use?

Mansize_tissue · 2 Aug 2007 at 22:38

Magic Man said:
But how does it know which file to use?

Well, i'm pretty sure, when using Vista, the page file on the hard drive which is being used less (i.e. under less i/o operations) will be used first. Say you had a setup with 2 hard drives: one for the OS and one for games, both containing a page file. If you ran a game, obviously that hard drive would be under a lot of load and the one with the OS on would be less active. Say the game needs to transfer data to the page file, having one on the OS drive would mean the game drive would be under half as much load because, instead of copying data to the page file on the same drive, it's copied to a different one instead. It would mean both hard drives would be running, splitting the load (when the page file needs to be used).

I think this is how it should work. I've had many discussions about this on another forum and this is, apparantly, what happens in Vista- i'm not too sure about XP, though.