HTPC drive setup

[Roosti3]

In the process of planning a HTPC upgrade and wondering what the latest thinking on drive confirguration is.

Looking to buy a 7200 sata2 1.5TB Caviar Green.

Am I putting everything (OS/page file/data) onto seperate partitions on this drive, or do I want multiple drives?

(I have several sata2 5400 80/250GB drives spare due to this upgrade)


Media Centre running XP MCE edition
Asus M2NPV-VM (onboard Geforce 6150) (socket AM2, DDR2 8gb max 240pin)
AMD 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+
2014 Ram (4 x 512 corsair)
Hauppage Nova-DT Dual DVB-T
Antec NSK2480 with a seasonic aswell I think

 

[SpeedEng66]

well for me I had no choice my case only has space for 2 hd's (3 if I use the extra dvd drive slot)
so I partitioned my hd (1tb) for 200 gb for os and other misc poop and pretty soon I will need to pick up another hd, im filling it up the 7xxgb kinda fast..

I guess it depends on how much space you have in your case

oh I just noticed you using a NSK2480 also so yea your better off saving that extra slot for future expansion

 

[In2Photos]

I've decide when I upgrade my HTPC that my old one will become a fileserver. It is getting to the point where I have too many machines that need to access data and it is spread out all over the place (photo files on my photo machine, movies on my HTPC, email on the laptop, etc).

So I plan to have my 1.5TB drive for my movies, a 500GB drive for photos and home videos, and a 200GB drive for the OS and other miscellaneous data (two partitions).

 

[elconejito]

My $0.02... You should probably be fine with just the one drive. Personally, I wouldn't partition*** but it's not a bad idea if you need to keep your media separate just in case you need to re-install windows.

I've got several drives in mine because at any given moment it might be recording up to 4 tv programs (2HD & 2SD) so i wanted to have a dedicated "recording" drive. The other drive is just for storing the live tv "buffer", and then OS/apps. I found that putting them all on the same drive led to a lot of skips if everything was going on at once. I had 2 drives in there at one point (OS/apps/buffer & recordings) and found it was a little better with the 3 drives (but not much). I suspect if the drives were WD Blacks it wouldn't be as big of an issue but the random seeks on the Green drives are rather painful.

*** As a rule of thumb, I dislike partitioning because it just introduces extra movement by the HDD heads as they skim over empty space to get from the OS partition to the data. For example, if you partition the first 100GB of space as C drive, and use up only 50GB then the head has to skim from the 50GB area past the 100GB mark to read data and then back again. So for performance reasons, it's not a good idea. It does make sense to separate data from OS/apps in case you need to do a reinstall you can wipe C without worry. But I like to use multiple drives for that instead of partitions.