How to configure two WD 640's?

[Rockinacoustic]

I've been running on a WD 640GB Blue for the past half year and recently picked up a WD 640GB Black at a good price. What I'd like to do is transfer my OS and programs to the black but I'm not sure which is optimal. Here's my ideas so far:

1). Mirror everything to the Black and use the Blue for back-ups.
2). Install OS and apps on the black, use the blue for media (Music, Movies).

Also for the second option, would it be wise to create a standalone partition for the OS, and run apps from the remaining partition?

Thanks in advance!

 

[railman]

The black drive is the better performer of the 2. An OS and app install on the black should give you a slight performance gain overall. I have always setup OS partitions seperate from apps primarily because your OS partition will become fragmented much faster than your app partition. If the OS partition is much smaller say 40GB you can defragment it faster and more often with good results.

 

[Rockinacoustic]

Yes, the larger cache on the black drive is exactly why I'd like to move everything over.

How large a partition should I make for the OS (Windows 7 Ultimate x64)? I've been reading around and 40GB seems like the minimum to go.

Also, for certain programs I commonly use like Photoshop, Office, Itunes, etc, would I see better performance putting them on the OS partition? Or is there no real-world difference?

 

[railman]

I would go for a 60GB partition for the OS. This would give you ample room for windows update files certain utilities that need to be installed on the root drive and any applications that insist on being installed there.

You will not get any performance increase installling apps to the OS partition. If you want to maintain a C:/ file structure for all your apps you can do so by creating a partition on the blue drive, lets say 100GB and mount that partition to an empty NTFS folder on drive C for your apps to be installed in.