maximum performance given my situation

[The One]

Hi guys,

I was running out of room on my aging IDE Seagate (http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/marketing/detail/0,1081,579,00.html) and snapped up a Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 800JD SATA with 8mb of cache from OCUK when I saw it in the B-grade section.

My question is what is the best way of arranging my data etc in order to get the best performance in windows/games?

I guess that would be to make 2 partitions on the WD, one for Windows and one for Games and use the old one for storage etc? If I do that will the performance boost be worth reinstalling Windows and all my programs on the new drive or will it be negligible?

Thanks for your help.

 

[ChrisLX200]

The new drive is faster - higher spec is quoted anyway.
You need about 20-30GIG for WinXP so that leaves about 50GB as a partition for Games. Your PageFile needs to be on the fastest drive too, so maybe put it on the Games partition rather than the Windows partition - not as good as placing it on a separate drive but your old one is a bit slow.

Your old drive I would also divide, making a dedicated partition just for storing backups. About 40GIG would allow for 2 backups (compressed disk images) of your system drive. Set the computer to automatically create a backup every week replacing the oldest one. I use Norton Ghost, but Acronis or PowerQuest DriveImage are good too.

Strictly, there's no need to re-install Windows but because your new drive is smaller than your old one it might be awkward to transfer.

 

[The One]

Hmm, interesting. I have 3 partitions on my old 120GB HDD (Windows, Games + storage, programs). Is there any way to transfer just the Windows partition onto the new drive?

I forgot to say that I actually have an external HDD for backing up important data (e-mails, browser settings, documents and other application data) for all the PCs on my LAN so I don't really need a 120GB for backup

 

[Zefan]

Sorry, but 20-30gb for xp ALONE? 15gb should be fine.