Installing programs for best speed...multiple harddrives?

[DNyholm]

I am trying to figure out the best way to install programs in order to get the best performance. Is it best to have the operating system (only) on a smaller harddrive and then throw your programs on a completely separate harddrive? I currently have my computer set up with a single drive partitioned with the OS and all my programs on one partition and all my pics/vids/mp3/etc... on the other partition. I noticed that when I play a game that the computer may stutter a little bit as it accesses from the HD in mid game. This just recently started happening and I was trying to figure a way to stop it from happening.

Any thought would be helpful.

TIA

 

[Billb2]

Defragment.
What's running in the background?
HDD access depends on the HDD's seek speed and transfer rate specs. Moving things around has some, though little, effect.
With everything on one drive, there's little you can do.
You could download HDTach and/or HDTune and compare your HDD against it's specs and against similar HDD's so see if you have a problem.

 

[Slugbait]

Best performance with two drives is to have the page file on the clean second drive, set to permanent (about 2.5 gigs should be about right). Install apps on the faster hard drive, regardless.

For example:
My Raptor is partitioned so the OS and apps I'll always need (such as Office) are on drive C. Other apps and games are on a different Raptor partition. My permanent swap file is on my Caviar. Peppy little box...

 

[Roguestar]

Originally posted by: DNyholm
I noticed that when I play a game that the computer may stutter a little bit as it accesses from the HD in mid game.

This sounds like classic not-enough-RAM territory.

Check background apps, install more RAM etc.


Or if you're on Vista it could be hard drive indexing going on in the background.