HDD Upgrade & Partitioning

[XLjedi]

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?

[Peto]

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 . Getting 7200's will be a serious step up from the 5400 you've been running.

[sonar732]

This was recently discussed here.

Dude...you've got 4 gb of ram. Crap! I said DUDE...where's the police officer from Baltimore? :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.

[XLjedi]

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.

I put my order in yesterday, so probably a week before I have to allocate a day of my life to re-installing drivers.

[sonar732]

Originally Posted by aaronblood

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.

[XLjedi]

Originally Posted by sonar732

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?

[XLjedi]

Originally Posted by sonar732

This was recently discussed here.

Dude...you've got 4 gb of ram. Crap! I said DUDE...where's the police officer from Baltimore? :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.