HDD Upgrade & Partitioning

XLjedi · 02-14-08, 03:37 PM

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?

02-14-08, 03:37 PM	#1
XLjedi Ace of the Deep Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Palm Beach, Florida Posts: 1,243 Downloads: 53 Uploads: 8	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? __________________ Last edited by XLjedi; 02-14-08 at 03:47 PM.