The philosophy of hard drive size for system on a windows PC?

[Intel8008]

I have always been of the opinion that for the system drive one should use a smaller size and not have any data that is not related to system operation located on the system drive. I have experimented moving My Documents; My Music, My Pictures; Program files; etc to other drives. A common system I operate today would typically have 2 x 4 300gig Raid 5 for video storage, 40 gigs for system and perhaps a 100 gig for music and application data files. If one looks around today at the current size of drives 80gig seems to be the smallest size offered by the major manufactures. Another hybrid configuration I once tried was to format a second partition on the system disk just big enough to run the swap file on.

Our current mobos offer 4 ide connections, 2 sata connections, 2 sata raid connections and 1 parallel ide raid connection.

I wonder like to see a good discussion on how to set up the idea PC for heavy storage and fast system disk operation. My first thought is that these mobos really confuse the issue because the sata ide and the sata ide raid offer only 2 drives which mean installing either a 4 or 8 connector pci card for internal storage. Thus, a big waste of chips and space on the mobo.

Should one try to find smaller then 80 gig drives for system?
Should system ever be raided?
Is sata really better for system?

Perhaps another day we could get into what is the idea configuration on this subject for linux?

 

[n0cmonkey]

I think this is an OS oriented question.

 

[Tiamat]

Raptor 74 for OS, Programs, Games

xxxxx GB for media.



Welcome to Anandtech!

 

[LiquidIce1337]

Originally posted by: Tiamat
Raptor 74 for OS, Programs, Games

xxxxx GB for media.



Welcome to Anandtech!

I agree witht hat, I have a 60 gig WD for my system applications and games on... whenever i download something.. it's all organized onto my maxtor 250 gig 5400 rpm drive slow and large it has music,video,images,documents, pictures just everything unrelated to my system and it keep from getting the primary partition fragmented too much. Great system for when you reformat alot.. you can just instal drivers from another hard drive.. never lose a thing.. just hope it doesn't die.

 

[Ricemarine]

What I do since I don't have a small hard drive, is partition 7 GB of my 300 GB drive for operating system (since its faster than using JBOD). JBOD goes as my media. Even though smaller, its slower, and using that for my OS would slow down my boot times.

 

[bfonnes]

Originally posted by: Ricemarine
What I do since I don't have a small hard drive, is partition 7 GB of my 300 GB drive for operating system (since its faster than using JBOD). JBOD goes as my media. Even though smaller, its slower, and using that for my OS would slow down my boot times.

don't worry, I am sure at some point in the future if not the near future windows will take up 80GB,

BFonnes

 

[Intel8008]

There is a gray area that is a juxtaposition of hardware and system

 

[Intel8008]

Using a 7 gig partition on a 300 gig drive doesn't solve maxing head movement efficiency because if you are dling a file to the large partition on the physical drive and calls are being made to system at the same time itl requires the heads to move across the whole drive.

 

[Intel8008]

Originally posted by: bfonnes

Originally posted by: Ricemarine
What I do since I don't have a small hard drive, is partition 7 GB of my 300 GB drive for operating system (since its faster than using JBOD). JBOD goes as my media. Even though smaller, its slower, and using that for my OS would slow down my boot times.

don't worry, I am sure at some point in the future if not the near future windows will take up 80GB,

BFonnes

I have some systems currently running that use only 20 gig drives. I think a 40 gig is more then enough if you move all data to another drive. Thus I beleive 80 gig drives are over kill. But perhaps there are other opinions?

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: Intel8008
Using a 7 gig partition on a 300 gig drive doesn't solve maxing head movement efficiency because if you are dling a file to the large partition on the physical drive and calls are being made to system at the same time itl requires the heads to move across the whole drive.

You find me a residential Internet connection that can sustain >10MB/sec (enough to actually make a difference) and then you have a point.

Until then, 100-500KB/sec on top of system operations = ah heck-all difference.