New Hard Drive Question

[oaktown311]

I was forced to get a new hard drive this week when the old 80gb one I had finally filled-up, causing all kinds of lock-ups and errors in Windows. So I hopped on Newegg and got myself a 250gb WD. This is my first Hard Drive addition install, and I have a few questions. So far, this is what I have done: Installed HD using SATA cable that came with mobo (better one coming), then d/led WD newest tool kit and set-up new HD as boot drive, which copied everything over from my old one, system and non-system files, then I went into my BIOS and disabled RAID (only have one HD on SATA) and moved my new HD up the boot list to #1 (when I did this, new HD became C: drive, old one became F. I did not partition anything yet, and I still have two HD's installed with the same stuff on them. Should I just remove my old 80gb HD and keep as backup, etc., or should I leave it in and use it as storage? I guess it is up to me, but I want to make sure that whatever I do, I do not compromise the speed that my newest drive offers. It seems I have done all or most of what I should have, but I don't notice much of a difference in speed yet, which is disappointing. Any help is appreciated, and here are my specs:

Gigabyte K8triton nForce3, etc.
Athlon 64 3500+
Radeon 9800 Pro
Hard drives:
OLD: Seagate Barracuda 80gb 7200 rpm 4mb cache (4 yrs old) - hooked up with reg. IDE connection
NEW: WD Caviar SE16 250GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - hooked up via SATA

p.s. this is a silly question, as I'm sure it doesn't matter, but I lost my mobo instruction book and I was wondering if it matters at all which SATA connection (0 or 1) I hook up to if I'm not using raid? thanks again.

 

[WoodButcher]

Get your mobo manual online from gigabyte, I wouldn't expect a big speed difference other than reading / writing times as your files won't get fragmented quite so bad. You should no longer get "lock-ups" or errors caused by your hard drive. Windows and most other programs need large amounts of "free space" to operate properly. Run scandisc or any other hd tools seagate has on your old hd, reformat and use it for storage if it is still in working condition.

 

[Paperdoc]

A suggestion: keep the old HDD, reformat as WoodButcher said. Then set up your system so that the swap drive or paging file is on the D: drive, rather than C:. It will save you a bit of space and may speed up the system by separating the swap drive use from all the other stuff.

In XP Pro, do Start ... Control Panel ... System, choose the Advanced tab, click on Performance ... Settings, choose the Advanced tab, click on Virtual Memory ... Change. There you can choose which drive and what size to use. Rough guide: Paging File (Swap File) size should be at least a big as you RAM for minimum, and two to four times this for max. Make sure to set NO Paging File on the C: drive if you set one up on D:.

 

[bob4432]

you will not notice a big difference since you are staying @ the same rpm range. on paper the new one will look much better but in the seek times they will be pretty close. the only way to really notice a difference would have been go with a 10K raptor and then you would actually notice a difference.

like others have stated, put the pagefile on the F drive now, that will help a bit, but the difference you are going to feel in real world are minimal.

sadly about the only benefit sata offers in the real world is a thinner cable as even the newest ide hdds haven't saturated the ata100 standard