View Full Version : HDD Upgrade & Partitioning
My little 7200 RPM Raptor has been limping along for a month or so now on cyclic error life support.
My present setup is/was: 78MB Raptor SATA was the main C drive holding windows, apps, games and so forth. And then I've got a bigger 200gig 5400 SCSI holding pictures, movies, music and so on.
I'm thinking of picking up a couple new Western Digital WD5000AAKS 500GB Sata 7200, 16MB cache drives. Amazon has em for $105 US! Even though the SCSI's might still be a tad faster, I kinda like the Sata drives just for the no mess cords. That'll take me from 280G to 1TB of storage. That should last me a while...
I think this time around I'm gonna pay a little closer attention to the partitioning. So far, I think I'll at least setup the following:
Disk 1:
Windows OS: 20GB
Applications: 200GB (Adobe, MS Office)
Games:
Disk 2:
Paging File: 6-8GB (RAM 4GB * 1.5)
Music:
Movies:
Pictures:
Other Data/Docs:
I've heard there are some performance gains in having a seperate partition for your paging file (virtual RAM) on a seperate drive from the OS (and the FAT32 file system seems to be recommended for it). Not exactly sure yet how much I'm gonna allocate to each partition, but I'm thinking for defragging and so forth, might be nice to have smaller bites to chew on. ...and I definitely want the OS and drivers in their own partitions this time around. Wonder if there might be some benefit to locating games on the non-OS drive as well?
Any other suggestions on how to proceed? :know:
Well--I'll just throw this out there. You've been getting along with less than 500GB for a while so maybe 500GB would be enough space? If so, you could set up 2 500's in a Raid 0 configuration. That can give you faster load times which are are easy to get used to...
As far as partitioning: I used to slice my drives like what you're talking about doing but do it less now. I'm currently running two 250GB Seagates, dualboot XP and Vista (Vista for work related stuff only at this point). I have the Vista drive with 2 partitions and keep files I want backed up on that (Drive E). Most of my games are on the C Drive with XP and they all run well--and I wouldn't expect them to run better on a seperate partition.
As far as Defragging goes--It doesn't take long to do it on my system. I run defrag at least once a month and go have a sandwich. Once I even went outside ;). If your system is solid and reasonably fast, the partitions just sound like extra work to me. But you DO want to put OS's in their own partitions!!!
And I'd stay away from FAT32 unless you're running Win9X. NTFS is more efficient. I don't have any experience putting virtual memory in its own partition so I'll leave that for someone else who has done it to answer that one.
In the long run though--it sounds like you know enough to get yourself into trouble without my help ;) :lol: . Getting 7200's will be a serious step up from the 5400 you've been running.
sonar732
02-15-08, 07:44 AM
This was recently discussed here (http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showpost.php?p=760533&postcount=4).
Dude...you've got 4 gb of ram. Crap! I said DUDE...where's the police officer from Baltimore? :damn::damn::rotfl::rotfl:
I would say that since you've got 4 gb of ram that the need for a swap/virtual partition isn't needed. As Petro stated, I'd go with the RAID 0 configuration for general speed.
Thanks for the replies...
That was the sorta stuff I needed to hear. I wasn't sure if I was just creating extra work for myself with a lot of extra partitions. I think I'll just stick to the OS and page file partitions then.
I'll look into NTFS vs. FAT32, and the Raid 0 config, thanks! You're probably right, 500 is more than enough... so it may be time for Raid.
The Raptor I'm replacing was a 7200... just my 200GB storage drive was a 5400. So I doubt I'll notice that much of a difference going to the new 7200's. The raid config though, that might gimme a boost. :yep:
I put my order in yesterday, so probably a week before I have to allocate a day of my life to re-installing drivers. :roll:
This was recently discussed here (http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showpost.php?p=760533&postcount=4).
Dude...you've got 4 gb of ram. Crap! I said DUDE...where's the police officer from Baltimore? :damn::damn::rotfl::rotfl:
I would say that since you've got 4 gb of ram that the need for a swap/virtual partition isn't needed. As Petro stated, I'd go with the RAID 0 configuration for general speed.
Yeah... we'll see... a year from now people will be tellin me I need more...
RAID 0 it will be then.
sonar732
02-15-08, 09:36 AM
Thanks for the replies...
I'll look into NTFS vs. FAT32, and the Raid 0 config, thanks! You're probably right, 500 is more than enough... so it may be time for Raid.
One of the reasons why FAT32 was recommended for virtual memory is because that's the only file system available at the time and when you needed virtual memory due to small physical ram allocation.
I can remember a day when us tech geeks would say..."I would never need more than 1 gb of hard drive space or 128mb of ram."
If you aren't worried about security, go ahead and use FAT32. However, in this day and age, I would use NTFS unless you have some older applications that depend on data stored in a FAT32 system.
If you aren't worried about security, go ahead and use FAT32. However, in this day and age, I would use NTFS unless you have some older applications that depend on data stored in a FAT32 system.
My (perhaps naive) understanding was that I could specify different file systems for each partition. I was only going to use FAT32 for the page file based on a commentary I saw in "partitioning best practices" writeup on the MS website. It said:
Although the version of NTFS in Windows XP has features that make it perform better than earlier versions of NTFS, you can still eek out some performance gains for small volumes by formatting them as FAT32 instead of NTFS. Lack of security from not having pagefile.sys protected by NTFS permissions is not much of a concern since it's an unreadable binary file anyway.
Now granted, this was a commentary dated June 6, 2005. And the paging file in this case was about 4G for an assumed 1G RAM.
What do you think, am I over doing it? Should I just stick to NTFS, or don't even bother with the paging file partition?
I have to read up on the Raid config... Can I even make partitions?
sonar732
02-15-08, 11:02 AM
What do you think, am I over doing it? Should I just stick to NTFS, or don't even bother with the paging file partition?
Don't bother with the partition since you have 4gb of ram. You current SCSI drive and controller should have some type of documentation that I would read up on for RAID 0. If possible, take a picture of the guts of your system and post them here.
The new 500G drives are both going to be Sata. I'm just pulling the 200G SCSI drive out. Maybe I'll use it for a network storage drive or something. Performance hit or not, I'll be glad to finally rid my box of that ribbon. ...and yeah, the ASUS board has a great manual that covers the RAID setup in detail, I just haven't paid much attention to it.
I should be able to setup the RAID config without further assistance, but I'll post back in a week or so if I have questions. :yep:
Hey do you happen to know...
Is there a relatively easy way to just shoot an image of the OS setup/drivers/etc to a new partition on the 200G SCSI drive? That would sure be a lot easier than starting from scratch!
The raptor can boot OK in safe mode and the damaged areas seem to (coincidentally) be associated with my GWX gaming files only. If I don't use safe mode I get the hard disk missing error.
sonar732
02-15-08, 02:13 PM
Hey do you happen to know...
Is there a relatively easy way to just shoot an image of the OS setup/drivers/etc to a new partition on the 200G SCSI drive? That would sure be a lot easier than starting from scratch!
The raptor can boot OK in safe mode and the damaged areas seem to (coincidentally) be associated with my GWX gaming files only. If I don't use safe mode I get the hard disk missing error.
I've looked and can't find any freeware programs for this purpose. I'm sure that SUBMAN1 will have a suggestion on this.
However, it sounds like you could use the unattended installation feature in XP to accomplish this since you only want OS setup and drivers. Do a google of sysprep.exe to see if this will work for you..
sonar732
02-16-08, 12:41 PM
This article was on Yahoo's homepage today. I hope it helps!
What to Back Up and How to Do It? (http://tech.yahoo.com/blog/null/71852)
My 500G drives have been shipped...
I think in the next month I'll probably be ordering another pair. I also pre-ordered a LinkSys network storage case/hardware (2 drive bays). So I'll need to populate it once it arrives sometime in mid-March. That's basically how I plan to manage backups.
Reading up on the Raid 0 array config, I've learned one thing that gives me pause... On the one hand it may improve access times for data, on the other, it sounds like the striping process requires some sort of encoder/decoder to be active in the CPU, and may have an impact on system processing performance.
I'm not so sure that I want to trade off faster load times for lower or choppy FPS.
Well here's an update on where I'm at now after recovering from the HDD failure of about a month ago. Along with some insight into installing Vista64 (ultimate edition)
Got my 2 new 7200 rpm 500 gig drives and realized that I just wasn't going to be happy without 10k drives for running my games. So I put in another order for a pair of 70 gig 10k drives.
Amazon delivered quickly once more, and I now have the dual 10k drives installed Raid0 as a single 130 gig array for my OS, working/gaming drive. I put those slower dual 500s in a network storage device (LinkSys NAS200) as a RAID1 array and I now have a seperate place to store all my family photos, videos and music. The NAS200 is slower than Christmas for large backups but for the kind of individual movement of smallish photo/music/video files that I need it's going to work well. (Don't buy one as a backup device for your entire HD though, it's just not cutout for that type of work.)
For my HD backup I kept my 200 gig IDE drive (reformatted to NTFS) as a backup device for shooting images of my RAID0 pair. I think I'm all set now on storage, redundancy and backup management.
I chose to go with Vista64 this round for the OS and have been met with all the expected agony of trying to get all the 64 bit drivers working. I even flashed the latest BIOS for my ASUS moboard although in hindsight, I'm not sure it was necessary and it may have caused me some new problems. So far what I've taken away from the whole process is that when installing Vista less seems to be better.
Less in the sense that your best bet is to just:
1) install the Vista OS as is, with the possible exception of having a RAID driver disk ready to insert in the process (hate that I'm still dealing with 3.5 floppies for stuff like this)
2) Once you have a version of Vista running (forget loading any extra drivers at this point), plug in your ethernet cable and go straight to Windows Update and give Vista a chance to hunt for and que up all the drivers for you. I was pleasantly surprised that Vista not only pulled up 50 or so standard windows updates, but it also listed about a half-dozen optional ones that were specifically aimed at my nVidia chipset, GPU, LinkSys wireless card, onboard RealTek audio, Sil Raid drivers, as well as a few others... I could've saved myself about a day of data and driver gathering if I would've just let Vista have it's way right from the start. I think all the the drivers I tried to install were overwritten with better versions that Vista found for me anyway.
3) My one word of caution has to do with GPU driver updates that Vista recommends. Do not underestimate the value of being able to actually see :huh: the workspace. I made the mistake of choosing to install all the optional goodies in one shot and was met with a "video source undetected" message from my monitor. Sounded like everything loaded OK, but couldn't actually see anything.
Presently, I'm in the process of debugging my last issue with Vista64. Which is installing the one optional nVidia driver for my GPU. I'm glad I took the time to shoot an image of my system to that secondary drive, cuz I've had to reimage the RAID0 pair a couple times now after not being able to get a video display.
I'm going to look into maybe seeing if a different monitor makes any difference...
My Logitech G15 keyboard has useable Vista64 drivers... even my Saitek X52 FCS (almost shockingly) had 64 bit drivers available. Although I think there might be issues with a couple of the X52 HID devices (the mini-mouse gadgets) that I may need to hunt down.
Once I get the GPU driver issue sorted then THEN I'll actually be able to try to run a game on the thing. We'll see what pain that causes later... I suspect there will be sorrow :nope: , but such is life when tinkering with a new OS.
Oh, almost forgot. Something kinda amusing...
My old BIOS had my 4 ram DIMMS reported as 4096 of installed memory. Silly me, I actually thought the BIOS was right. Turns out I built the PC such a long time ago I had forgotten what I literally put in the sockets. They were actually 4 pair of 500MB dimms for a REAL total of 2 gigs, not 4. I had to yank out a pair and look at em closely to actually figure out what I had in there.
Flashing the new BIOS corrected that misidentification and at least now I don't feel so bad about Vista not recognizing 4gigs... I spent a day and a half trying to figure out why my 2 gigs wasn't being recognized as 4. :rotfl:
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