hard drive management

[zylander]

In the past I have never really given much thought as to which hard drive should be the master and which the slave, or where I should install windows. I have always just plugged them in, put windows on a 5gig partition, and start installing other apps.

I have now gotten rid of all my IDE drives and I'm going to install 2 SATA drives; a Maxtor 200gb 16mb cache, and a WD 80gb 8mb cache. windows will have its own small partition, all my other apps and games will be on the remaining space and the other drive. Does it really matter where I have windows installed? Is there that big of a difference between the 8mb cache and the 16mb?

Also, the 200gb drive requires the maxtor big drive enabler, which I have, but if I use that as the primary drive and install windows on there, how do I format it and enable the full 200gigs after windows is installed? Is there a way to do that before I install windows and create partitions out of the full 200 gigs in the windows boot up screen?

 

[nippyjun]

Personally i'd want windows, apps, and games on the faster drive and my data on the slower drive.

 

[Cerb]

If you partition and format the drive before you install Windows on it, all should be well, but get Windows supporting large HDDs before you use the higher capacity (IE, go beyond ~130GB).