Is there a performance decrease on games/software running HDD seperate from OS?

[Sirrion]

If i place WIndows Vista on one HDD and run all my games and software off of another seperate HDD is there any performance difference vs running both Vista and all my games/software off of 1 harddrive?

Was thinking of putting Vista and some very commonly run programs (Firefox, Winzip, Winamp, etc) on one harddrive, and running all my PC games off a seperate one. But i want to know if there will be any performance gain in doing this? Otherwise ill just run everything off a larger HDD and put music and movies on a seperate one.

Thanks!

 

[A5]

Not too much difference, but one thing that helps is to have the swapfile on a different drive than the OS.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Originally posted by: A5
Not too much difference, but one thing that helps is to have the swapfile on a different drive than the OS.

This was debunked on several sites some time ago, however as said, there will be no performance drop unless the second drive is slower

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

FWIW I've run them all different ways. Games on D:, OS on C:, swap on E:, Raptors in RAID 0, games on D:, etc.

Nothing really mattered enough for me to tell. Now I just have one 7200rpm drive and put everything on C:

I'm sure others will tout their RAID 0 raptor rigs loading games so fast that they beat the game before the start screen even shows up, but I couldn't tell.

 

[Nothinman]

The only way it would matter is if one is a lot faster or slower than the other or if you've got something else running that will compete for I/O time. And even in those scenarios it'll only affect load times, unless you're low on memory and do a lot of paging in game but that's a separate issue.

 

[aka1nas]

The only time that I have noticed a difference is when I have a heavily I/O bound task. If I have it hitting a drive or array other than my Windows drive, the system stays much more responsive. Games usually don't hit the hard disk heavily enough for this to come into play other than when they are loading levels.