HDD Arrangement Suggestions

Fireblade2K4 · 7 Sep 2006 at 11:51

Ok I have just had my new Seagate 400Gb 7200.10 delivered to add to my already existing Seagate 200Gb drive giving me a little more space

I currently have 3 HDD's in my system, the main 200Gb SATA which currently holds everything I have installed on my system, OS, programs and applications, and many games also the are 2 old 40Gb IDE's which are used for downloads only and are about 50% full.

The two IDE drives are being taken out leaving me with a 400Gb and 200Gb SATA drive.

I intend to backup my documents from my 200Gb drive onto one of the IDE drives for the time being and once I have formatted and installed my new drive just copy them back across again, same with all my favourites etc.

What I want to know is how "You" would carry out this process, how would you arrange the 2 SATA drives taking into account that I want somewhere for my O/S, programs and applications, somewhere for games, somewhere for digital pictures and somewhere for downloads to be stored all so they can be kept arranged and tidy. I initially had the idea of splitting the 400Gb drive into 2 and having 3 drives, but now I'm thinking possibly more.

Suggestions are welcome on how you would carry out the whole process, from format, backing up of data etc.

Stu

deadeyedic30 · 7 Sep 2006 at 15:48

What ever you choose they say its better to have your swap file on a seperate hard drive to the windows installation.

You could have a 30Gb patition for windows and then use some of the extra space to store an image so if you installation goes t!ts up, you could restore it rather than reinstall.

I have my WD250 in about 10 partitions, but someone said too many is bad as it slows the system down, but they have yet to provide me with the proof.
I have one partition for wallpapers and music and backup pst files. Another partition solely for game patches and mods, BF2 1.4 500mb, Op Flashpoint mods 700mb, so they soon fill up. And that before i get to my film collection i want to convert to avi and store on the hard drives.

warheart · 8 Sep 2006 at 09:33

Fireblade2K4, for correct arrangement and successful backup you can use specified programs.

malcolm · 8 Sep 2006 at 09:45

I used to break up drives into partitions, but have largely given up on that, except for my htpc whcih has only one drive in it.

Option 1: I would remove the IDE drives temporarily,then use Norton Ghost (other disc drive imaging programs are available!) to copy the exisiting 200Gbyte drive to the new one, maybe in a new 200Gbyte partition, maybe not. Then remove the 200Gbyte and see if the system will boot from the new drive. If it does, all is well, if not just replace the 200Gbyte and resort to plan B, whatever that may be. Replace the IDE drives, get the data you want from them

Option 2: new drive on it's own in the system. Clean load of Win XP into a 30 to 40 Gig partition at the start of the new drive. Once everything is installed as you want it, make the rest of the drive into 1 or more partitions for data, programs, games etc. Now replace the 200 and make sure the system is set to boot from the new drive, not the 200. Copy across whatever you need. Do the same with the 2 IDE drives and then remove them for the last time.

darreny · 8 Sep 2006 at 10:03

i would always reccommend having a partition unnused of say 15gig for each drive in a multiple setup so if your boot drive does fail you have somewhere to install the os on another drive without losing data, as for the arrangement its worthwhile to consider what you use your pc for, if you listen to music while also doing other thing for instance then its worthwhile keeping your music on another drive so it can read from that while writing to another disc.

Fireblade2K4 · 8 Sep 2006 at 20:47

Thanks for all the suggestions so far guys I think this is something I'm going to tackle tomorrow, not sure how yet but I'm sure this thread will come in handy, thanks again.

Stu