HD setup

[ochadd]

Looking for suggestions on the best setup for response time and game loading performance. I've got two older 250GB WD2500AAKS drives and one brand new 640GB Seagate 7200.11 drive. I've got a total of 200GB of data currently and could possibly use 300GB if I move some old stuff from CD/DVDs. I have an external drive for backups.

What I'm thinking of now:

Option 1

640GB single:
Partition 1: Operating System & Utilities - 20GB
Partition 2: Game Installs - 200GB
Partition 3: Misc - 350GB

250GB single
Partition 1: Page/Swap - 8GB
Partition 2: Movies & Music - 200GB

250GB single
Partition 1: Ubuntu install - 10GB
Partition 2: Misc - Rest of drive
__________
Option 2

640GB Single:
Partition 1: Operating System & Utilities - 20GB
Partition 2: Music, Movies, Misc - Rest of Drive

RAID 0 - 500GB:
Partition 1: Page/Swap - 8GB
Partition 2: Ubuntu install - 10GB
Partition 3: Game Installs - Rest of Drives

I'm not crazy about putting my OS on a RAID 0 set. Even though uptime isn't critical I'd rather not have the worry. If the benefit would be noticable I'd consider it. Any suggestions?

 

[Denithor]

A little partition-happy, aren't you?

I would lean toward option 1 because raid0 doesn't improve real-world performance much for the desktop environment (helps some in servers with higher IO throughput).

Throw in an extra 4GB DDR2 and get RamDisk Plus. Allocate 3GB to your OS and the rest to a ramdisk. Point your pagefile, tmp/temp folders & browser cache to the ramdisk. Watch your performance improve.

 

[myocardia]

I would put both of your OS's on the first two partitions of the 640GB, then make the last partition storage for your music and movies. Then, make one of your 250GB drives your game disk. The other 250GB drive, you can do whatever you want with, including putting your pagefile there. You could also RAID 0 the 250's, if you want, and have both your pagefile and your games there. Of course, RAM drives are very nice, but P5K's don't seem to like 8GB of RAM, at least according to a few people around here.

 

[Comdrpopnfresh]

I was in a similar situation 3 weeks ago- same 250gb aaks, got a WD 640, and had an old 40gb ide I used for paging and for longterm, os-crash independent storage.
I moved vista to the new drive. I could because I only had it running for a month, and all the installation files were safe on that 40gb drive. My boot times went down, things open quicker, and vista performance rating went up to max 5.9 on hdd.
I didn't like the prospects of having 640gb of continuous drive, where if a crash happened, i'd lose it all to reinstall. So I made a 60gb primary partition for long term storage the 40gb did, and gave the rest to games, downloads, programs and vista. I then wiped and removed the 40gb ide drive, and gave the 250gb drive to paging, ubuntu, and as storage for my dual tv-tuners: 60 hours worth. I'm content.

In your situation, you may get better performance with the two 250gb drives in raid 0 for vista + programs, and use the 640gb for everything else- idk, you'd have to bench the raid 0 vs the new 640gb drive.
With vista, you can span the pagefile accross multiple disks to reduce latency and increase throughput- but definitly get the pagefile off of the OS partition/disk.

check out partitionmagic

are you looking to preserve your data, or are you okay with reinstalling?

 

[ochadd]

I'm going to format for sure as it's been a couple years since the last time I wiped completely.

I might be a little partition happy but Windows has always seemed to function better this way. As one of you guys posted I think Option 1 is pretty close with a couple changes.

640GB single:
Partition 1: Operating System & Utilities - 20GB
Partition 2: Movies & music- Rest of Disk

250GB single
Partition 1: Game Installs - Entire Disk

250GB single
Partition 1: Page/Swap - 8GB
Partition 2: Ubuntu install - 10GB
Partition 3: Misc - Rest of drive

That should keep the OS, games, and page files all on their own spindle on the outer edges. Without additional hardware I think this is as good as it's going to get. Look good?

 

[Comdrpopnfresh]

you'd have to change the default directories for the 'programs files' folder and install directories to point things to the 250gb drive. Some installers don't let you choose the directory, and do default c://program files.....

you'd also be lowering disk transfer rates and load times keeping games off the 640gb drive- plus data would have to be shuffled from game directories and program directories on the 250gb to the core windows files/folders on the 640gb drive... It's best to arrange your data so that at any one time, during typical situations, there is only one disk-disk transfer. I'm not familiar with the technicals of the paging system, but if data is called and moved to the c:// drive while playing a game, you'd have two bi-directional transfers on the 640gb drive.
I'd partition your 640gb drive to 200gb for OS+Programs+Games, the rest for music and movies (who plays an fps while watching a movie). Or music+movies on the first 250gb drive. Then change the pagefile to be located on both 250gb drives- you'd get throughput increases similar to a raid when paging, without actually arraying the drives.

Be sure any partitions you create are primary rather than logical. That way, if ur os takes a dive, the partition tables are preserved, and date is not lost. IDK if windows creates logical or primary ones, but i know partitionmagic lets you choose. I hear ghost is good too.

I'd think of getting vista- it'll thrash your drives for the first two weeks, but then prefetch will make things more zippy once it learns your typical activities and initial indexing is done. You could also utilize readyboost to that end as well. How much ram do you have? I think the pagefile is usually 1.5x the amt of installed ram. So even if you had 4gb of ram, if u spanned the page across the two 250gb drives, you'd only be taking 3 from each...

 

[ochadd]

Originally posted by: Comdrpopnfresh Some installers don't let you choose the directory, and do default c://program files.....

you'd also be lowering disk transfer rates and load times keeping games off the 640gb drive- plus data would have to be shuffled from game directories and program directories on the 250gb to the core windows files/folders on the 640gb drive... It's best to arrange your data so that at any one time, during typical situations, there is only one disk-disk transfer. I'm not familiar with the technicals of the paging system, but if data is called and moved to the c:// drive while playing a game, you'd have two bi-directional transfers on the 640gb drive.

In regard to the first part there. You can change the default install location to wherever you like via: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ProgramFilesDir

I'm not aware of a situation where Windows moves files into the "core" windows files/folders? During gaming situations the disks will be accessed to load things into memory and shouldn't be doing any disk to disk transfers outside of the page file if you can count that. I might be wrong here but I believe textures, objects, maps, etc go straight from the install location into memory.