System drive and storage drive ?

[Nexi]

Hey all

I'm planning to build a computer ( mainly for the purpose of gaming ) and need some answers regarding HDs.

I've seen people speaking system drives and then an additional drive for other software ( storage ).
If I have understood this correctly then the system drive is used for the OS mainly ( if anything else at all ? ) and should be a very fast drive ( raptor ? ) and then the storage drive is used for games ect ( a large drive ).

If what I just have said is correct, how does it help the computer peform better in games, when the OS is on the fast drive and the games on the slower/bigger drive ?

And last but not least, recommendations to system and storage drives are more than welcome.

Thanks in advance.

 

[QuixoticOne]

It can be beneficial to some things to have the drives physically different but in your case for games it is just not
that relevant. Defrag the drive every few weeks, blow the dust off, keep at least about 40% space free on the
drive and it'll run very fast.

Get ample memory like 4GB probably if not more (if you needed it for some other reason; 4 is good for games IMHO)
and the game will have basically everything it needs for a level if not the whole game stored in memory and not on
the disc so the disc speed really won't show up much at all. Maybe a brief pause between levels when it goes to play
a video cut-scene or switch to a new map or something like that, but it will be minor with today's drives and CPU/memory.

The main reason it is convenient to have a distinct OS/programs drive is that you can just image copy that relatively
small partition/drive for a 100% reliable simple backup you can restore the OS and programs from and not worry that
it'll mess up your stored "data"/documents on the other physical drive. Also with the small drive/partition of course the
backup of it will be small.. whereas if you had just one big drive/partition as "C:" you couldn't easily back it up as an
image since it'd be ALL your data so maybe very huge. And you couldn't image restore it so easily since you'd want
to keep your newer/changed "data" while restoring the OS/program files as they were before. It is possible to do it
either way, it is just simpler if you keep them apart. For a mainly gaming system it is kind of irrelevant... it isn't like you're going to upgrade to Vista then to Windows 7 within 9 months and do plenty of backup/restore/OS change operations unless you absolutely have to.

One of the 500GB 750GB or 1TB seagate barracuda or spinpoint f1 drives are VERY fast yet they're commodity
priced today, in the $79-$120 range in general, and they're faster than the raptors of a couple years ago were, much bigger, and cheaper. Just go with that unless you have some old drive you want to reuse in which case I'd say even that would probably be suitable given a decent amount of RAM / free disk space / defragging etc.

If you want to buy a second drive, consider getting a similarly sized one and an external USB enclosure for it for backups and stuff and just keep it turned off safely when not in use.

 

[Nexi]

Thanks alot for the reply.

I'll get one of those you mention