One drive for this, one for that

mcgriffo · 2 Jan 2008 at 16:40

Quick question.... I currently have two hard disks.... one for data, the other for apps and the windows o/s

I was thinking of getting another and just putting the o/s on there and then having the other two for a) apps b) data

BUT there seems to be evidence that it would be even better to have FOUR disks and store the page file separately... so the configuration would be:

(a) page file (b) o/s (c) apps (d) data

Putting to one side for a second different speeds and capacity, RAID etc.

Is this the best configuaration? And if so, would you have the speed of each drive descending from (a) - (d) in the above example?

C64 · 2 Jan 2008 at 18:48

fastest drive for OS and apps / games see no reason not to have games and apps on C:
everything else on other disks

mcgriffo · 3 Jan 2008 at 10:45

So is it agreed that the best configuration (without RAID) is to have the page file on one disk, o/s on another, apps/games on another, and data on another?

musicman53 · 3 Jan 2008 at 10:50

mcgriffo said:
So is it agreed that the best configuration (without RAID) is to have the page file on one disk, o/s on another, apps/games on another, and data on another?

There is no gain(tho others see fit to think there is)for having OS on one drive, apps/games(installed)on another.

If the OS screws up then you still have to reinstall the OS AND the apps and games as there are files/other from those that are installed on boot drive anyway.

Heliospherez · 3 Jan 2008 at 11:11

But if you loose everything that you have on 1 drive, you have to re-install it all again anyway - so what are you actually saying ?

There is definate advantage in having a very fast small drive with quick seek times for the OS and a larger slower drive (usually over 500GB) with the data on, but as you said, putting apps on a 2nd drive will give no performance increas.

One reason I have all my Videos, MP3's and 24Gb of Photos on a 2nd drive, is so I can disconnect it and back it up remotely a lot more safely. I can also disable in the BIOS to prevent the OS seeing it - a very secure method of data protection.

melbourne720 · 3 Jan 2008 at 12:22

Surely the best configuration would be

DISK 1: Fast + low seek time (e.g. Raptor, SSD) - Contains OS and Apps
Disk 2: Big and fast transfer (Samsung SATA 500GB, WD 5000AAKS, Seagate Barracuda, etc) -Contains Data and Page file.

posibly splitting disk 1 into:-

Disk 1A: OS
Disk 1B: Apps

...if the boot drive was particularly small (SSD for example)

mcgriffo · 3 Jan 2008 at 12:22

And the page file?

decto · 3 Jan 2008 at 16:36

I have a pair of 250GB Sata drives.

Drive 1 OS, Games Apps Etc
Drive 2 Swap file + general storage.

Anything critical gets backed up from storage onto the server which has raid mirror.

I'm not sure if this is the fastest setup but back when I had 1GB in for a while it practically elimated the disc access stutter when gaming so I've stuck with it ever since.

If I have any big files to unzip etc, I download onto Drive 1 the unrar to Drive 2

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mcgriffo · 4 Jan 2008 at 11:04

Swap file is the page file, right?

If you keep it on the same drive as general storage, wouldn't it be more likely to fragment?

rpstewart · 4 Jan 2008 at 17:32

If you set the page file as a defined size rather than letting Windows manage it then it won't fragment.

The ideal situation is actually to have an HDD per file but that's just not practical so you have to think about what you're using the PC for and where the bottlenecks are. I/O contention is a performance killer so you should be looking to avoid it wherever possible - this is why most video editing setups will have separate drives for source and target material.

Without knowing precisely what you're using the machine for it's difficult to recommend anything specifically but unless you're hammering the disks then there isn't a huge benefit to be gained from running more than a couple of disks.