Hard Drive Logistics

shodan · 23 Jul 2006 at 11:45

Hi all,

My new build will have 2 hard drives, a 36GB Raptor and a 320GB Barracuda.

The idea was to have the raptor as the OS drive to improve performance and also to make reinstalling Win XP or upgrading (to vista) easier.

I've noticed some people like to keep their system drive just for the OS, nothing else. Others have both the OS and their applications on the system drive.

I realise that if you have to reinstall the OS, you'll have to reinstall your applications, but I thought that at least if they are installed to the barracuda, you'll most likely keep your settings.

What do you do and for what reasons?

Thanks.

shodan · 23 Jul 2006 at 17:42

JonC said:
Keep OS and Apps on the faster drive, keep all media/data on the other.

If you reinstall windows/applications, you'll most likely lose a reasonable amount of info from the registry (urgh) anyway. Plus lots of programs also use your user profile to store settings, so it's really hit and miss wether you'll actually have anything that hangs together. Best thing to do is to try and do an export of settings if you can. If not, clean install time

Right. Are you including games when you say applications? My raptor is probably too small to deal with the OS, apps AND games.

shodan · 24 Jul 2006 at 20:53

Does ANYBODY out there separate their applications from windows?

shodan · 25 Jul 2006 at 18:35

Hxc said:
I do, but by partition instead, usually leave about 10GB on one of my discs for windows, and stick apps etc on the rest. Would get better performance if you ran games on one and windows on the other physical disk though...

And what benefits do you personally appreciate by putting windows and apps on separate partitions?

R0551 said:
I've got a 100gb (?) drive split up into C: D: E: F: and a seperate 120gb drive for games as the patches can get quite big. Although I'm about to format again and aplit it to C: D: E: and games again on the seperate drive.

Yes, I'll be installing games and any large applications to the large 2nd disk. At the moment my partitioning strategy is as so:

36GB Raptor: Either just C: with windows and Apps together or partitioned into separate windows and apps partitions, depending on what people say here.

320GB Barracuda: A 6-8?GB partition for the page file, a ~30GB partition for backing up the Raptor, and the rest a large partition for data/media/games and large applications.

What is the optimum size of a page file partition if you have 2GB of RAM? Some guides say 1.5 times your RAM, others at least 3 times.