Help with HDD/OS stuffs.

[A Boojum Snark]

Well I am going to be getting a new 10k RPM drive today in a few hours with my christmas money, my old drive being I think 5400 RPM (at most).

I've read that it is faster to have the OS on a seperate drive from everything else, however will it actually make any difference since it would be going on such a slow drive? Would I be just as well off to put it all on my new one?

[duherman]

I have no idea but I kinda do what you're planning to do. I have a 30 gb drive with the os on and anti spyware/adware programs. Mirc. Msn and such on it. Then my 80 gb harddrive is where I have my games and movies and music.

[Black Mage]

leave your os on the old drive, it's fine there
leave apps on the old drive (anything that you don't need preformace for. word, and stuff like that)
leave files on old drive if you don't need them to be on a fast drive
move games to the new drive
move game-related files to new drive

before you do anything with the new drive: move swapfile to new drive
(if you feel like hacking, make a fat16 partition that's 3-4x the size of your maximum expected total physical memory size and put the swap on that. it will increase disk and swap performace a bit.)

[Sandrock]

I can't believe what I'm hearing BM.

Of course put your OS/Apps on the new drive. The OS will be much more responsive and will startup/shutdown faster. You should use the 5400RPM for storage because it is slower. Storage is mainly there for just that, storage. What's the point of having a fast 10K RPM drive and let files sit on it doing nothing all day? What a waste of speed. Or even better yet, put as much on your fast drive as you can, and use the old drive for storage, but put your least accessed files on the older drive. That will optimize space and speed.

I would suggest creating a separate partition for your OS. This will separate it from the rest of your files, and help cut back on fragmentation of the OS.

What you can even do is split the swapfile between both drives. Put a certain amount on each drive. Yes you can do that.

It is a little more work setting everything up, but it will help in the end.

[A Boojum Snark]

Well I ended up getting a 7200, the mail-in rebate was too tempting, 120GB for $50 = winnar. >_>

BM:
It takes about 5-7 minutes for windows to finish booting once I sign in, it is horridly slow D:
In addition to this my old drive was converted to NTFS from fat32 when I upgraded win98 to 2k, which I found out from reading MonsE's guide is not nice cause converted fat32 still uses the smaller cluster sizes. Also going with his guide I plan to do the fat16 swap file partition.
Even more nasty is 2k was put on when my drive was fairly full, so it is most likely more to the outer edge of the disc than the inner which I hear is faster.

I think what I'll do is toss in the new drive by itself and get the OS working, then copy/install what I need off the old drive, and then reformat it to real NTFS (not fat32 coversion).

Sand: I've been twiddling with the idea of a seperate OS partition but I am not sure, I'll probably decide when it comes time to actually do it.

[duherman]

Well what I'm doing seems fine.

[Leaderz0rz]

for the fastest possible response, everything needs to be on the same partition of the same drive as the os, so if you want steam to be as fast as possible put it on the same drive. for things it realyl doesn't matter, like i have all my mp3s on a usb 2.0 external drive and its perfectly fine, same with my anime and stuff. games will run off it to but its slower then auctaly being on the same drive as the os. putting your OS on a 5400 rpm drive is as smart as installing bonzai buddy

[A Boojum Snark]

Awwww, you mean my cuddly purple monkey is evil?


















</sarcasm> ^_^

[Black Mage]

I can't believe what I'm hearing BM.

Of course put your OS/Apps on the new drive. The OS will be much more responsive and will startup/shutdown faster. You should use the 5400RPM for storage because it is slower. Storage is mainly there for just that, storage. What's the point of having a fast 10K RPM drive and let files sit on it doing nothing all day? What a waste of speed. Or even better yet, put as much on your fast drive as you can, and use the old drive for storage, but put your least accessed files on the older drive. That will optimize space and speed.

I would suggest creating a separate partition for your OS. This will separate it from the rest of your files, and help cut back on fragmentation of the OS.

What you can even do is split the swapfile between both drives. Put a certain amount on each drive. Yes you can do that.

It is a little more work setting everything up, but it will help in the end.

[snapback]37412[/snapback]

the os can stay on the old drive, the important bits are loaded into RAM on boot anyways. you'll lose about 5-30s on boot, but you save a bunch of space on the fast drive. (i'm assuming that you have at least 1gb of ram, given that you're getting a 10kRPM drive) you'll be fine leaving the os on the slow drive.
if you want to save ram, put the os on the fast drive and hit the don't load me into RAM registry flag (it's in there somewhere). your performance will drop quite a bit though (also, you'll note a 5-60s drop in boot time. i don't think it's worth it though)

[Sandrock]

There really isn't a reason why you shouldn't put the OS on a seperate partition. It keeps things organized, helps cut back on fragmentation, etc. My only quirk with it is when installing new games/programs, it still always defaults to the C partition, so you have to manually choose a new location rather than keep hitting next. Windows is bloated, but not too bad. I have a 5GB Windows partition, and it usually hovers around 3.5 GB. With a 120 GB drive, that really isn't too bad. Just use the OS partition strictly for that, and it will keep the size down. Put all your media/apps/games and even the temporary files/temporary internet files on a different partition. That will keep sizes down and keep your OS unfragmented.

[SwiftSpear]

There really isn't a reason why you shouldn't put the OS on a seperate partition. It keeps things organized, helps cut back on fragmentation, etc. My only quirk with it is when installing new games/programs, it still always defaults to the C partition, so you have to manually choose a new location rather than keep hitting next. Windows is bloated, but not too bad. I have a 5GB Windows partition, and it usually hovers around 3.5 GB. With a 120 GB drive, that really isn't too bad. Just use the OS partition strictly for that, and it will keep the size down. Put all your media/apps/games and even the temporary files/temporary internet files on a different partition. That will keep sizes down and keep your OS unfragmented.

[snapback]37502[/snapback]

Also the massively underestimated benifit of making virus removal from the OS and software independently WAY easier.

Nothing works better than a full OS format when the computer has reached its limit of screwedupness, and with seperate partitions and a good virus scan you can do it with absolutly no damage to file storage.

[Black Mage]

it still always defaults to the C partition, so you have to manually choose a new location rather than keep hitting next.

[snapback]37502[/snapback]

start --> run --> CMD

Code: [Select]

SET ProgramFiles=X:\Program Files
EXIT
white hackery wins

[SwiftSpear]

it still always defaults to the C partition, so you have to manually choose a new location rather than keep hitting next.

[snapback]37502[/snapback]

start --> run --> CMD

Code: [Select]

SET ProgramFiles=X:\Program Files
EXIT
white hackery wins

[snapback]37518[/snapback]

That's going to be useful info...

Thnx!

[lolfighter]

Three partitions are minimum anyway if you ask me, even with only one physical disk: OS/apps, data, swapfile. If compjutar si borke, format c: and your data is still there nice and snug on d:. I like to keep my most used applications (read: games >_> ) away from the system partition too, to cut down on fragmentation.