Partitioning - Two 250G drives -advice needed

[Michael]

The last few pieces I need are ordered, so now I need to figure out the best partitioning scheme for my new computer.

I'll have 2 x 250G SATA II drives and my new computer is based off the NF4 chipset so I could use RAID if I wanted too.

My main OS will be XP Pro. I probably will want a partition for some flavour of Linux (have been a Redhat fan for years so I'm thinking Fedora). I may want to have a partition for XP64 as well.

I prefer to have my OS in one partition and data/programs in another.

I know that Linus can't see NTFS disks, but NTFS is more efficient than FAT32 with large HDs.

Any advice or any links to good detailed articles that will let me learn what to do on my own? Advice requested on both RAID and partitioning.

In case it matters, I'll have a DVD Writer combo drive on one of my IDE channels.

thanks,

Michael

 

[Michael]

one last try. Google searching isn'tm working well ...

Michael

 

[Tostada]

Well, I wouldn't do RAID. Not just because RAID doesn't help much (and would it work on Linux?), but because you'd be so totally screwed if one of the drives died.

If you do a lot of DVD ripping, I'd just keep it simple:
Drive1 = 40GB XP, 10GB XP64, 50GB total Linux partitions, 150GB data
Drive2 = 250GB data

And just keep everything NTFS except the Linux ones. If you really need to share stuff between, make a little FAT32 parititon.

If you do much DVD encoding (or a number of other situations), you'll be happy that you have your second drive as one big partition. Then it's always easy to rip a DVD from Drive1 -> Drive2 so it works the fastest.

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: Tostada
Well, I wouldn't do RAID. Not just because RAID doesn't help much (and would it work on Linux?), but because you'd be so totally screwed if one of the drives died.

If you do a lot of DVD ripping, I'd just keep it simple:
Drive1 = 40GB XP, 10GB XP64, 50GB total Linux partitions, 150GB data
Drive2 = 250GB data

And just keep everything NTFS except the Linux ones. If you really need to share stuff between, make a little FAT32 parititon.

If you do much DVD encoding (or a number of other situations), you'll be happy that you have your second drive as one big partition. Then it's always easy to rip a DVD from Drive1 -> Drive2 so it works the fastest.

I agree, 40GB in FAT32 or some other file system will be more than enough for Linux or any other OS.

 

[Michael]

I was leaning against RAID to begin with and going for the 1 drive partitioned up for OS and the other for pure data. Linux can read NTSF, but can't reliably write to it. Linux needs FAT32 to share files reliably. So if you want to play video files or MP3s in Linux and Windows you usually end up needing a common FAT32 disk. FAT32 is no where near as efficient for larger drives though.

I'll try the suggestions of 4 partitions on the 1st drive and 1 big one on the second and see how it goes.

Thanks for the advice so far and I'm always interested in new opinions.

Michael