Best hard drive setup?

[Hicks12]

Well i have a 250AAKS and a 640AAKS, i am going todo a format today and was wondering whats the best way of doing this.

I believe my system will be quicker ingeneral if i use the 640gb as the boot drive, right? The 250aaks seems to get only 60-80 MB/s but the 640 gets 110 MB/s, if so then how much should i split?. For some reason i found 70gb isnt enough on my 250gb(as windows partition) so would 100gb still be good?.

For storage ill use the 250AAKS but for the rest of the space on the 640gb how should i partition it? It will be used for games so would i be better off just leaving the rest of it(~500GB) as a single partition? or would i see a boost in speed if its split even smaller?.

Any help is appreciated .

[saltynay]

If you use a 32gb boot partition you get the best performance from the drive just install programs to the other partition as default. Also you could turn off your paging file which increases speed but some programs require a paging file to run hasn't bothered me much though.

[noveltylamp]

I ran HDTune benchmark on my 640, looked at the graph and performance is pretty consistant until 35% of the way through the drive (>100MB/Sec) so I made my OS partition 200GB based on that, so anything up to 224GB. Don't turn off pagefile, windows is designed for use with one. If you don't need 200GB by all means set it lower. Installing all your stuff on a different partition to the OS doesn't make sense as the disk will be constantly seeking as your apps call DLLs from the OS partition. I do however keep steam off the OS partition to save redownloading everything every time i reformat/image. If you're using vista the winsxs folder can end up HUGE so you'll need a big partition.

[watercooled]

Also create a partition just over double the size of your RAM (I have 4GB ram so created a 10GB partition) and use that for your pagefile. It stops it getting fragmented so should increase performance slightly.

[GoNz0]

you could turn off your paging file which increases speed but some programs require a paging file to run hasn't bothered me much though.

its a myth, there was a lot of research done on this over at osnn.net by peris, he found that a machine with a disabled page file would still create a small 100mb one as windows needs it to run.

[Hicks12]

Well i formated a few days ago and set windows at 100gb on the 640gb along with 300gb for games and then 200gb for storage, reason for partitioning is to keep the drive fast as possible so storage is the last partition.
You can split a partition in windows right? Ill try and add that 10gb partition for the PF as i got 4gb of ram.

Cheers for help.

[watercooled]

Yes, in Vista you can shrink partitions in disk management. I'd recommend defragmenting before doing this, though.

[Hicks12]

Cant seem to find a way on xp sadly, dont have Vista anymore

[watercooled]

Oh, didn't check your OS, sorry. Try using something like Paragon Partition Manager. There's a trial version here: http://www.paragon-software.com/home...utmk=253534601

[Hicks12]

Will have a look, cheers.

[Roundabout]

I'd recommend setting your pagefile partition on one of the secondary hard drives.

It can then operate independently and wont be affected by access to OS/Application files.