3 drives to run windows..

[GoNz0]

i have been tinkering with the operating system and i have been testing a 3 drive setup for none raid performance (had to many errors with onboard raid)

C drives my 150gb raptor containing window and program files with a 100mb paging file to keep windows happy,
i then brought a 1tb samsung and split that into 3 partitions, 1's a spare should i ever need a little storage while i format, or i may even image windows onto there "just in case", anyway the other 2 partitions are split for downloads and my docs.

the easy part in all this was moving the my docs folder, all you do is right click and properties, then use the move button to put it on another drive (calling it my docs again), then sit back and wait while windows copies the data across.

i had already copied the downloads across before taking my old drive offline.

so that sums up the windows drive and the data from my docs and downloads is tucked away on another drive.

i also have a 36gb raptor that i was going to use for paging files, so thats formatted and houses the paging file to yet again take some strain off the windows drive.

it was then i found the enviroment variables in system properties > advanced

windows has a really bad habit of getting fragmented fast due to all the temp files it throws around in a days usage, so under the user variables i have changed TEMP & TMP paths to the paging file drive & under system variables i have done the same, so all paging and temp files now take place on the dinky raptor.


the bootup speed is about 40% faster now getting to desktop, and about 100% faster at loading all the task bar icons and apps, returning the CPU to idle compared to having everything on c drive.

extracting temporary files from a rar archive is easily twice as fast as before, and it doesnt matter if your doing it from the windows drive or 1 of the storage partitions as the unzipping is taking place on the paging files drive (winrar has an option of where to extract temp files so this has to be changed as well as the other temp remaps)

basically the whole pc now runs faster by doing this, so i posted it up here so you can also tinker about with temp files as i have never really seen this mentioned on here, just moving the paging file.

[[GSV]Trig]

I'm setup with 3 drives.

Drive 1: 74Gb Raptor, used for OS and application installs.
Drive 2: 250Gb, used for my docs and game installs.
Drive 3: 500Gb, used for swap file and temp folders, downloads etc...