How can I setup my Hard Drives

[serlex]

Hi

I would like to setup my hard drives and operating systems, would like some advice.

I have:
1TB SATA
2x75GB IDE

OS I'll have
Windows Professional
CentOS 5

I also have large collection (100GB+) of movies, music etc

Thanks

[Zak33]

Hi serlex

If I were you I'd do it like this:

Chuck one of the IDE drives into your "spares box" for when your aunty Ethel's pc falls over next year. You just dont need IDE drives for much else when a 1 TB drive will be so jolly fast.

1 TB Sata drive: Partition it so that the first partition is about 200gig. Install your OS onto this and your software that you want to boot fast. Only install stuff that rarely changes (other than OS updates) so that it always stays tidy, unfragmented and that Defrag works really fast on it.

Then use the rest of that 1TB drive for your films and other large files. This can get fragmented all it wants, but prolly wont because IT WONT HAVE THE SWAP FILE ON IT, so when you save stuff to it, it'll be quite qucikly dumped on the platters, relatively unmessy. This partition will also defrag easily. If you need to reinstall the OS you can do so easily without losing your films from the larger partition.

Use ONE of the IDE drives to back-up your VITAL data. Plug it in once per month and copy essentials over to it, then unplug it.

[ascension]

1TB SATA and 2x75GB IDE?

I would partition that 1 TB drive into half. In the first partition, I'd put XP Pro on it, the swap file* as well as all the programs i.e. MS Office, games, etc. A 1TB drive is pretty fast, and the stuff you need to load quickly i.e OS, programs will be mostly towards the outer edge of the platter (where the areal bit density is also higher). Unless you rapidly install tens of GBs worth of programs, it will be a while before the drive begins to put stuff towards the slower zones.

On the second partition, I'd put CentOS and other stuff related to it.

The movies and other static stuff I'd split up and put on the 2x75 GB drives. Here, performance does not matter so much since the files are going to be static and not modified frequently.

Ofcourse, regularly backup everything important.

* Ideally, the swap file should be on a fast, secondary physical drive, but it's not essential. Keep the swap file size fixed, to avoid it's fragmentation. Defragmentation should not be much of a problem even otherwise if you use a good defragger like Diskeeper. I have 3x500GB Seagates and 1x640GB WD in my tower and Diskeeper 2008 automatically defrags them in the background nicely without my involvement.

[serlex]

Thank you, my 1TB has not arrived yet, i will post here what i have done with it