How to integrate new hard drive??

[Bill272]

I have an 800 Duron system that I built with a 20GB 5400 hard drive. I initially partitioned this 2GB, 8GBI, 10GB and put windows on the 2GB partition, thinking I would have only that on it. Well a few other things got loaded on that drive, and now I?m getting low disk space messages daily. I just bought an 80GB 7200 drive because I wanted more space and the ability to copy software CD?s to it so that I can install from the HD copy and not have to worry about using the CD (when possible).

The question now is how to configure these drives? Should I partition the 80GB drive at all? Should I use the 20GB as the storage drive for the CD copies and install to the 80?? Should the OS go in it?s own partition or not?? Lots of questions, just no direction on where to go. Any help out there??

 

[cleverhandle]

Well, you should definitely install the OS to the 80 GB, since it's the faster drive. Other than that, it depends a lot on how much you actually need to store. The partitioning zealots will, of course, tell you that you need 8 different partitions (OS, pagefile, games, programs, granny pr0n, etc.). If you're running only one OS, here's what I would do: split the 80 GB in half (or maybe 20/60), into OS/programs and static storage (MP3's, etc.), then use the 20 GB to hold a Ghost image of the OS/programs partition and copies of any stuff from the first drive that, come hell or high water, you just can't lose, in the event of a physical disk failure. That makes good use of all that space on the new drive, gives you backup space, and should work fine unless you're storing huge (60 GB+) amounts of static data.

 

[tomrizzo]

bump

 

[Bill272]

Thanks, that sounds like a decent plan. I might go with the 40/40 and ghost the pgm/os partition to the 20 before it gets too cluttered up.