What in which partition??

Soldato
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I have a 640Gb F1 Hard drive partitioned with 100gb as the first parition and then the rest as the main partition but i am a bit confused as to what to put on each partion.
This is what i currently have:

Smaller partition:
OS
Norman AV
Biostar Software
Razer (mouse) Software
And basically anything else that is windows.

Main partition:
My Music
My Pictures
My Videos
All Games
and any other pieces of software

Does this sound about right or would you change anything?

I am eventually going to get an external hard drive and replace my F1 with an SSD or a VelociRaptor

Thanks,

Flare
 
I just got a new Hitachi 7k1000.b and its the fastest disk in my system, so:

OS (windows XP) 11Gb C:\
Page file 8Gb (I have 4Gb Ram) D:\
Games 40Gb I tend to play one game at a time and don't buy new often E:\
Data 950Gb F:\

That is basically what I will do but I run Azureus so that its easier if I keep my drive letters consistant with where the program expects to find them.

The reason I have a separate OS and page file is that the OS won't get fragmented by the page file as much, and that its apparently a bit fastest to have a dedicated pagefile. Games I leave in their own directory since many don't need a reinstall after OS install and causes less fragmentation than putting them in the OS drive. Data on its own certainly not on the OS partition which will get formated when I reinstall OS.

I plan on making a partition on one of my other drives for a dual boot - OS like windows 7 - if it takes my fancy. Its much easier to do this when u have a new hard drive with a surplus capacity than at a later date. How much space would u give windows 7 (I've not used vista on my pc but win XP 64-bit uses a bit more space than win XP 32-bit)?
 
I just got a new Hitachi 7k1000.b and its the fastest disk in my system, so:

OS (windows XP) 11Gb C:\
Page file 8Gb (I have 4Gb Ram) D:\
Games 40Gb I tend to play one game at a time and don't buy new often E:\
Data 950Gb F:\

That is basically what I will do but I run Azureus so that its easier if I keep my drive letters consistant with where the program expects to find them.

The reason I have a separate OS and page file is that the OS won't get fragmented by the page file as much, and that its apparently a bit fastest to have a dedicated pagefile. Games I leave in their own directory since many don't need a reinstall after OS install and causes less fragmentation than putting them in the OS drive. Data on its own certainly not on the OS partition which will get formated when I reinstall OS.

I plan on making a partition on one of my other drives for a dual boot - OS like windows 7 - if it takes my fancy. Its much easier to do this when u have a new hard drive with a surplus capacity than at a later date. How much space would u give windows 7 (I've not used vista on my pc but win XP 64-bit uses a bit more space than win XP 32-bit)?

If you have 4GB of ram you certainly don't need an 8GB page file. Windows's recommended page file sizes are completely wrong at really anything above 1GB. The more RAM you have the less of a page file (if any at all) you need. I have 4GB and set my page file to only 1GB (and never have any problems). Also you will only get a performance benefit if the page file is on a physically separate drive (simply putting it on a different partition really won't make any difference).

For the OP, what you should be doing though is if you should be putting your games on either the same partition as your OS or on another one between the OS and the 'Media' one. Remember hard drives are fastest at the start of the drive and slowest at the end. I rough approximation is perforance begins to degrade after anything placed from the 30% of the drive onwards.

I.e. 1 TB drive will have the best speeds from 0-300GB and speed gradually drops off from 300GB-end of drive.
 
If you have 4GB of ram you certainly don't need an 8GB page file. Windows's recommended page file sizes are completely wrong at really anything above 1GB. The more RAM you have the less of a page file (if any at all) you need. I have 4GB and set my page file to only 1GB (and never have any problems). Also you will only get a performance benefit if the page file is on a physically separate drive (simply putting it on a different partition really won't make any difference).

For the OP, what you should be doing though is if you should be putting your games on either the same partition as your OS or on another one between the OS and the 'Media' one. Remember hard drives are fastest at the start of the drive and slowest at the end. I rough approximation is perforance begins to degrade after anything placed from the 30% of the drive onwards.

I.e. 1 TB drive will have the best speeds from 0-300GB and speed gradually drops off from 300GB-end of drive.

Yes the page file should be on a seperate drive to improve performance, a different partition on the same drive actually slows it down a bit because the head has to move further between OS sections and page file sections. For maximum performance, put a small page file on each of your drives.
Unfortunately page file sizes aren't quite that easy to say what's best size for what system, they're more complicated than just more RAM.. but I have no problems disabling my page file on 8GB RAM, until programs start using up more than around 7GB, then it starts getting unpredictable, but I never go near that in normal usage.
 
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