Another Partioning question

[Thetech]

I plan on reinstalling windows XP and repartioning my 2 hard disk.
The way I currently have my setup is I have Windows on 1 partion on HD 0 and the
Page file on a separate partition on HD 0, in addition to another partition on HD0 that
has temp\cache files for web browsers etc.

And I had my games installed on the second drive, in addition to other partitions.

From what I read it would be better to have the page file on the second HD?

If so then a better setup would be this? Windows XP, Games, Apps, on separate partitions on the 1st drive, and then the Page file, temp/cache and file storage on the 2nd drive?

 

[Nothinman]

The way I currently have my setup is I have Windows on 1 partion on HD 0 and the
Page file on a separate partition on HD 0, in addition to another partition on HD0 that
has temp\cache files for web browsers etc.

That's probably the worst setup that you can have. Everytime the pagefile and temp/cache files need accessed you're making the drive do a full seek to get to the other partitions. Not to mention the fact that you now have 3 MFTs on that drive so each access is doubled because it first has to seek into the MFT to find the file then seek in that partition again to actually read the file.

From what I read it would be better to have the page file on the second HD?

Depends on what else is on the second drive. But if you've got enough memory that you're not really using the pagefile then it won't matter either way.

 

[Thetech]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

The way I currently have my setup is I have Windows on 1 partion on HD 0 and the
Page file on a separate partition on HD 0, in addition to another partition on HD0 that
has temp\cache files for web browsers etc.

That's probably the worst setup that you can have. Everytime the pagefile and temp/cache files need accessed you're making the drive do a full seek to get to the other partitions. Not to mention the fact that you now have 3 MFTs on that drive so each access is doubled because it first has to seek into the MFT to find the file then seek in that partition again to actually read the file.

From what I read it would be better to have the page file on the second HD?

Depends on what else is on the second drive. But if you've got enough memory that you're not really using the pagefile then it won't matter either way.

Could you explain in more detail, as to how the first example works?

I have 2GB's of ram, drive 0 is a little slower than drive 1, at the time I was thinking it would be better to have games installed on drive 1, but now I'm thinking it would be better to have Windows on the faster drive.

 

[Nothinman]

Could you explain in more detail, as to how the first example works?

You've got 1 drive divided up into 3 partitions so everytime data is needed from another partition the drive has to seek into the other partition's MFT, find the file and if the file is too large to be stored in the MFT then it has to seek to the file and read it. With 2G of memory caching probably makes up for most of the latency that you've added but it's hard to say.