Need Recommendations on Setting Up New Hard Drives

[nasttcar]

I have just built a new system. To get it going I moved my old 40gb IDE HD from the last computer because it had XP Pro on it.

I have also bought 2 new SATA hard drives, one a 150gb 10K Raptor, and a 500gb 7.2k Maxtor.

I plan to put the operating system on the 150 raptor and setup a partition that only XP resides in, a 2nd partition that all the program files load from.

I plan to setup the 500gb HD with 2 or maybe 3 partitions. One partition will hold a 2nd swap file, so that I have swap files on both drives, then a partition for data such a music, video, and pictures. Possibly a 3rd partition to be setaside as backup location for other computers on my network.

Here are my questions:
A. Does this sound like a reasonable approach?
B. Having never set partitions should I use a program like Partition Magic to set these up.
C. Can each partition of the hard drive be formatted differently such as FAT or NTFS? If so, why?
D. I have a multicard reader in my computer that now has drives set as e,f,g,h. I would prefer to have the hard drives to be c,d, on 1st drive, and e,f,g on the 2nd drive and then the card reader. Should I just go into computer management and change the card reader drives now?
E. I would like to keep the IDE 40gb drive I have now and make it an alternate boot drive in the case something goes wrong and I need to still boot up the computer and continue to use the computer as I do all the other work on the 2 SATA drives.
F. I have searched and it says it is best to have 2 SWAP files located on two physical drives and that this file should be in its own partition on the 2nd HD and at the fastest part of the drive. How do you set a swap file on 2 drives and how do you get the 2nd one on the fastest part of the 2nd drive?

Lots of questions and I want to do this right.

I did consider RAID0, but having had hard drives go bad on me I would like to keep data separate and on a specific drive so I can back it up easily with an external HD.

Thanks in advance for reading and providing answers and links.

 

[ZBOLTZ]

B: If you are running Windows XP or Vista, they do have programs built in that can create partitions, but I would recommend to use something like Partition magic as it will be a bit more powerful with more features.

C: Yes, you can format each partition differently, but why? If you are running Windows 2K/XP/Vista, then there is really no reason to run FAT/FAT32 unless you are dual booting with Win 9x. If you are not unning Win 9x at all, then there is no reason to run anything else but NTFS.

D: You may be able to change the drive letters on that card reader, but I would say that it will make more sense to keep them where they are. Sounds like you have your OS on C, and a cd/dvd rom on D. You can change them, but there is really no need to.

F: Just right click My Computer --> select Properties, --> select the Advanced tab, --> Where it says Performance, select Settings, --> Advanced tab, then under Virtual Memory, select change. Then just select your drive, tell it whether you want to set a certain amount or system managed then click set and your done for that drive. You may not need more than one pagefile though. I would recommend getting more ram if you are thinking about using a huge pagefile. Maybe have at least a gig or two of ram.

 

[stevty2889]

I would just use a single partition on the raptor for OS and applications. There is no point to leaving the programs on a seperate partition. If you have to re-install windows, you have to re-install all the programs anyway because all of the registry entries will be gone with windows. When installing windows to the raptor, disconnect the other drives, as sometimes it will screw up the drive letter asignment, and your OS drive could get assigned a drive letter other than C. Be sure to disconnect the multicard reader as well. After you have windows installed, you can change the drive letter for the rest of the drives from within windows. The only one that can't be changed is the C drive.

If you want to put a swap file on the second drive as well, make that partion first, it will put it at the inner portion of the drive, which is the faster section. In reality though, it's not going to make a whole lot of differance. If you are hitting the swap file often, you don't have enough RAM. I would just leave a single swap file on your OS drive.

And one other note, I wouldn't plan on just sticking in your 40gig drive that already has windows on it, in to a new machine, and expect it to boot. It will have all the drives and system files for the old machine, and even if it does manage to boot, you will have a lot of left over drivers from the old system, that could cause conflicts and slow things down.

 

[ZBOLTZ]

I have to agree, just use a raptor drive as your system drive and do not create any partitions in it. I would recommend to have a gig or two of ram so you don't have to access the page file any more than nessesary. I have 2 gigs of ram in my system with a system managed pagefile which seems to work pretty good.

 

[ronach]

The Disk management program in windows works just fine for what you want to do, used it many time myself successfully. Control Panel/Computer management/Storage/Disk management. Go for it. It's already paid for by you, your choice however.

 

[Smilin]

Do not partition either drive.

Options:
1.Put OS + Programs + Data on first drive, run backups to 2nd, maybe keep some heavy stuff like videos, music or something on 2nd. ..my suggestion..
2.Same as above but move your my docs folder to the second drive (if you have buttloads of data)
3.Same as above put install some infrequently used programs on 2nd drive.
4.Same as above but put pagefile on 2nd drive (tiny bit of value).

You can also search to see what others are doing:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...hreadid=1006717&enterthread=y&arctab=y
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...hreadid=1663824&enterthread=y&arctab=y
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...threadid=987404&enterthread=y&arctab=y
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...threadid=978742&enterthread=y&arctab=y
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...threadid=881835&enterthread=y&arctab=y
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...threadid=305854&enterthread=y&arctab=y
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...threadid=962464&enterthread=y&arctab=y
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...threadid=908394&enterthread=y&arctab=y

 

[Comdrpopnfresh]

I'd personally keep the Os and games on the raptor, with a large cluster size to keep read/write speeds high, use the ide 40gig for swap, and the 500 w/o partitions for storage.