Should I use a small os drive & large storage drive?

Ollie's Gadgets · 4 Aug 2006 at 20:50

Should I use a small os drive & large storage drive? Or should I partition?

Just bought a new maxtor 300gb hd as my old hd has started to die. Had to go through the process of building a new xp install (updates, programs, settings etc) and then coppied all of my data off the old hd into a folder called storage.

Seems to be working, however I was looking at some reviews of the hard disk and one person said:

"I would recommend you get this as an aditional drive to store lots of media (movies, pictures, tv, videos etc), but not as a main drive as with large capacities the seek time degrades over time, thus loading, copying things will become slower the more stuff you pile onto it. I would get a smaller 80gb for that job."

Is this true. Do you guy run a two hard disk setup in this way? Should I get a smaller drive for os e.g. raptor or is this overkill?

Can I reach the same effect by partioning my drive?

semi-pro waster · 4 Aug 2006 at 20:55

It is true that the more you have on a hard drive the slower it will load up to a point but as I understand it that is essentially because if you only have one drive you will be adding to the registry with every new program. If you are reasonably careful then it shouldn't be a big issue.

I'm probably not the best person to advise though as I have 3 hard drives which I have never defragged, store programs all on the C:\ drive and generally take no care of them in any way but I don't notice much in the way of a difference in speed terms. It is there compared to a fresh install but it isn't a great issue to me. Oh and this is coming up for 2 years since I first installed Windows, I am going to re-install soonish but there isn't any huge rush.

shodan · 5 Aug 2006 at 11:52

I'm building a new pc next week and I have 2 hard drives waiting to go into it.

A 36gb raptor for the OS and programs
A 320gb barracuda for games, documents, media etc.

I've only ever used a single hd in the past but I've seen a lot of advice here and elsewhere recommending separate drives. It gives a performance increase.

You can also get even more advantage from this by moving the windows page file to its own partition on the second physical disk, preferrably right at the beginning where the speed is quickest.

Lt Goody · 5 Aug 2006 at 16:59

Is it best to have OS and programs on one hd and games on the other or OS on it's own? i'm just thinking if a have to reinstall xp.

shodan · 5 Aug 2006 at 19:01

Lt Goody said:
Is it best to have OS and programs on one hd and games on the other or OS on it's own? i'm just thinking if a have to reinstall xp.

I've been asking much the same thing recently. Have a look at this thread

At the moment I think I'll put OS and programs together on the small drive. It is pretty difficult to separate them completely, as lots of programs save data into the windows user profile. Plus the OS is quite small compared to the smallest HD you can buy today, so you'd be wasting a lot of HD space by keeping one drive just for the OS.