How to set up my Hard Drives?

[Kelemvor]

Howdy,

I'm looking for advice and pros/cons for how to setup my hard drives to get the best performance. I have two older 40gig drives and a new 160gig drive. I was originally going to use one 40 for the OS and Apps, the other 40 for backups/images and the 160 for general stuff (movies, music, docs, etc).

However the 160 has the better specs so it might be better to partition that and use it for the OS/Apps.

OS is XP Pro if that matters...

Anyway, here's a list of the drive and their specs....

Maxtor D540X-4D - 4D040H2
40Gig, 5400RPM, Ultra ATA/100, 2meg Cache

Maxtor D740X-6L - 6L040J2
40Gig, 5400RPM, Ultra ATA/100, 2meg Cache

Western Digital - WD1600JBRTL
160Gig, 7200 RPM, Ultra ATA/100, 8meg Cache

So, what would you recommend and why? I do not do any hard core gaming at all. Will once WoW comes out but that's going to be a while.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: FrankyJunior
Howdy,

I'm looking for advice and pros/cons for how to setup my hard drives to get the best performance. I have two older 40gig drives and a new 160gig drive. I was originally going to use one 40 for the OS and Apps, the other 40 for backups/images and the 160 for general stuff (movies, music, docs, etc).

However the 160 has the better specs so it might be better to partition that and use it for the OS/Apps.

OS is XP Pro if that matters...

Anyway, here's a list of the drive and their specs....

Maxtor D540X-4D - 4D040H2
40Gig, 5400RPM, Ultra ATA/100, 2meg Cache

Maxtor D740X-6L - 6L040J2
40Gig, 5400RPM, Ultra ATA/100, 2meg Cache

Western Digital - WD1600JBRTL
160Gig, 7200 RPM, Ultra ATA/100, 8meg Cache

So, what would you recommend and why? I do not do any hard core gaming at all. Will once WoW comes out but that's going to be a while.

Set up the 160 as a single volume. Put everything on it. Use the 40s for backups. To be *really* convenient, put them in a USB case (available for $25 or so each) and you've got very convenient portable storage.

 

[Kelemvor]

Any other opinions? I don't think I'll need 80 gigs to do backups since I'll just be basically making an image of the Windows/Apps section for a quicker reinstall if something breaks. I guess I could break the 160 into a 40 and a 120 and then go from there...

 

[Crusty]

Those 40gb drives are a little to old and to slow to run an OS off of.

Sure you can...but why when you have a much faster 160gb drive to use

I would just use those 40gb drives as extra storage/backup and use the 160gb for most everything.

 

[Kelemvor]

That's kind of what I was thinking but I didn't know how much of a performance increase I would actually see by using the new drive over the old ones.

 

[0rion]

When you have more than one drive it is all ways a good idea to put the swap file on a diff drive than the OS, and make it big.

To do this START, Control Panel, System, Advanced tap, Settings for Performance, Advanced tap, Change, from there you should be able to find evey thing you need.

 

[Crusty]

That is not always true Orion, what if the hard drive is on the same channel as the OS drive?

Sometimes it can even slow things down, but this debate can go either way.

IMHO running any kind of decent setup with a swap file on a 5400 rpm drive is like driving a car with the Emergency brake on....stupid

 

[0rion]

ok a Diff partion on the faster drive

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: MCrusty
That is not always true Orion, what if the hard drive is on the same channel as the OS drive?

It's still a better idea. The same channel isn't bad.

Sometimes it can even slow things down, but this debate can go either way.

Please post a scenario under which it would slow down. Let me start out with mine: You are doing something that causes you to be starved for RAM. Typically that doesn't include a lot of drive access on the primary drive of IDE0, but let's assume it does. Now, rather than writing to that primary drive on the IDE0 channel, you're writing to the secondary drive on the IDE0 channel. So instead of massive amounts of drive contention and head movement as IDE0's drive0 fights to both swap RAM and do that other drive access we mentioned earlier, we're going to run across a marginal amount of crosstalk as both drives on the IDE0 channel are in use. Not significant imho.

IMHO running any kind of decent setup with a swap file on a 5400 rpm drive is like driving a car with the Emergency brake on....stupid

Let's consider what's going to cause you to need to use the swap file - you're starved for RAM. So you have to write to your pagefile. The easiest way to avoid this is, obviously, to buy more RAM. So, buy more RAM, and don't worry as much about your pagefile. With it being on another spindle the slowdown's going to be minor anyway.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: 0rion
ok a Diff partion on the faster drive

That's the worst of both worlds - having to manage yet another drive letter, plus no benefit of moving the swapfile to a different drive. Why would you want to do this? You're still going to write to the same spindle with the active OS on it, so why partition the drive, in this scenario?

 

[Crusty]

Originally posted by: dclive

Originally posted by: 0rion
ok a Diff partion on the faster drive

That's the worst of both worlds - having to manage yet another drive letter, plus no benefit of moving the swapfile to a different drive. Why would you want to do this? You're still going to write to the same spindle with the active OS on it, so why partition the drive, in this scenario?

To keep the pagefile from getting fragmented and to keep it from fragementing your other files.

 

[dclive]

That's easy to fix - just set your pagefile to a static size.

 

[Crusty]

Originally posted by: dclive
That's easy to fix - just set your pagefile to a static size.

Yes, but what if your drive is allready fragmented enough so that there is not one contiguous block big enough to hold the whole file. Instant fragmentation that you cannot fix.

 

[tiap]

Yes, but what if your drive is allready fragmented enough so that there is not one contiguous block big enough to hold the whole file. Instant fragmentation that you cannot fix.

Turn off your pagefile and defrag withour one, then reset your pagefile to a static size. I don't even use a pagefile and don't have any problems. There are no games on that box, but I do a lot of photo and video on it.

 

[0rion]

Originally posted by: dclive

Originally posted by: 0rion
ok a Diff partion on the faster drive

That's the worst of both worlds - having to manage yet another drive letter, plus no benefit of moving the swapfile to a different drive. Why would you want to do this? You're still going to write to the same spindle with the active OS on it, so why partition the drive, in this scenario?

There is a good reason to move the swapfile over first there is a boost in performance. Why else would Linux do it in installation. I dont know the techincal reason but it works.

 

[CaptnKirk]

Don't know if you have the RAID capability, but if you do here's an option.

1) Set up a 15000MB Partition (C:/) on the 160GB hard drive.
2) Set up a a 50 MB Partition & a 90MB partition on the HDD.
This will leave a 3.5 to 4.5 residual partition to use as a download target.

Configure the remaining pair of 40GB Maxtors @ 5400RPM as a RAID '0' pair.
and use them for archieve storage, what you loose in speed from the slower
rotation will be made up for by the alternate program writing between the 2
drives in the RAID Pair configuration. While 1 is writing, the second is ququeing,
and whe thew secon id writing the first is ququeing. The result is like writing
on even number pages and then to odd number pages, & back & forth, etc.

BIG PARTITIONS take time to format, & longer to be searched.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: 0rion

Originally posted by: dclive

Originally posted by: 0rion
ok a Diff partion on the faster drive

That's the worst of both worlds - having to manage yet another drive letter, plus no benefit of moving the swapfile to a different drive. Why would you want to do this? You're still going to write to the same spindle with the active OS on it, so why partition the drive, in this scenario?

There is a good reason to move the swapfile over first there is a boost in performance. Why else would Linux do it in installation. I dont know the techincal reason but it works.

Not in Windows there isn't. It's the same spindle, and that's the major holdup and issue with the swapfile. Move it off of that spindle and suddenly things look a lot better.

Linux has a swap partition for reasons known to Linus; Apple's UNIX variant puts the swapfile on the same partition as the core OS, and doesn't give users an easy way to move it, either. It's all up to the OS vendor how to handle the swapfile placement.

 

[Kelemvor]

Well, what I think I'm going to do is set the 160 into a 40 and a 120. Use the 40 for Win XP and all the Apps. Use the 120 for all my documents, movie files, sound files, etc. Use the old 40 gig drive for backing up and ghost images. And I'll probably just give the other 40 to my wife for her PC.