Best setup for XP with two 320gig HDs

[imtylerb]

Hello all,

Not really sure if this is more of a HD hardware or OS related question.

I was wondering what is the best way to setup a new XP install with two SATA 320gig HDs. In the past I have split each drive into 2 partitions for a total of 4 partitions (all basic drives). The first drive has my XP install and the second drive has all my music, documents, videos etc. I've left each drive split in case I've run Linux on those extra partitions, separate the volumes up for things like defragmenting, and keeping music on it's own partition.

I was wondering if it would give me any performance advantage to run a small page file partition on the second disc, like 3 gigs or something? I have 2 gigs of ram and use programs such as photoshop cs3 and also play newer games. I've heard that there is no advantage to setting up your page file on a its own partition if its on the same drive as it normally would be. Is this true? Does it hurt performance? Does it help to at least put it on the non system HD separate from my programs?

Thanks to anyone who can clarify these issues, I'd just like my setup to be optimal if I go through and reconfigure everything.

Thanks again...

 

[cprince]

I think that it would help with the performance if you put the page file on a separate drive. The reason is that you spread the hard disk accesses between two drives. That's why there is no performance gain if you put the page file on a separate partition in the same drive because one hard drive is still doing all the disk accesses. I don't think that you need to give a separate partition. Just split your secondary hard drive into two partitions(160GB each) and put the page file in one of those partition.

 

[imtylerb]

Thats what I figured...thanks for the help