SCSI HDDs, swapfile, OS and program placement

[SuperPickle]

I'm about to rebuild my OS again and want to do some planning for maximum performance regarding HDD access. I have 4 HDDs to put in this machine:
1x 18GB 15K U160 drive
1x 18GB 10K U160 drive
1x 9GB 10K Wide(?) SE drive--due to controler issues, this would be choked to 20MB/s transfer from a max of 40MB/s
1x large IDE storage drive

OK. I've done some reading on swapfile placement and have concluded that after determining the size I need, it should be placed on a different HDD than my OS (512MB RAM). This has been penciled to be put on the 9gig drive using the rest of the space for, basically a temp drive for ripping CDs, encoding video, and the like--expendable data.

I remember reading somewhere that putting programs on a different drive than the OS can also improve performance. That said, I've tentatively booked that gig for the 10K drive. The 15K drive would host the OS then.

The difference in transfer rate for the 10K and 15K drives are not that terribly dissimilar with the 15K drive edging out, of course. Seek time is where the faster spindles truely shine.

This will all go in a box with either WinXP or probably back to Win2K as I'm tired of XP's bubble-gum interface. Perhaps I'm overthinking this whole thing and all of this data segregation would be a fruitless, power-hungry, and heat belching effort. If anyone has suggestions on this setup and/or can point me to tutorials outlining optimized disk performance, help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

 

[charlie21]

Here's my setup:

9.1 GB 10K U2W SCSI - OS and swapfile
36.7 GB 10K U160 SCSI - programs and ripping drive
80 GB IDE - data storage

I don't really know if this is the best setup, but the difference between this and having everything on one drive is simply amazing. In retrospect, I think that I could have gotten away with just using 1 SCSI drive for the OS / swap / programs. Having the OS and programs on seperate drives makes installing things kind of a pain and I don't think it makes that much of a difference in speed. But having your data on a seperate drive is a must. Easily the best upgrade I've ever done. You'll be really happy with the results.

 

[SuperPickle]

I was wondering about the performance increase when putting programs on a different drive than the OS to see if it was really worth it. I've already had configurations where misc. data was on a different drive and yes, that's great. Has anyone used a similar setup with the OS, swapfile, and proggies all on different drives?
It seems logical to me that it would be fastest if the computer could pull from the OS drive, the program drive, and the swapfile all at the same time. Correct me if I'm just blowing smoke and also if any increase in performance is simply not going to be noticable.

 

[SuperPickle]

Bump to wade in the pool of collective AT experience and knowledge.

 

[redbeard1]

I've not done deep testing, but my impression was that having the swap file on a different hard drive slowed things down a little. Having it on the OS drive, but a different partition seemed ok, to me.

 

[mechBgon]

What exact drives are these? Some 10k drives are faster than some 15k drives

If it were me, I'd leave the 9Gb SE drive out of the picture, put the OS on the slower of the two other drives, and put the apps on the faster drive for quick launches. And I'd put matching-sized pagefiles on both drives so the OS can use whichever one's least loaded (or both at once!). Just my 2¢ worth...

Hopefully you're aware to not put the SE drive on the same SCSI chain as the LVD drives.