Two questions on disk performance

[Craig234]

I bought a $94.99 Seagate 320GB SATA I plan to use when I set up a new gaming PC.

1. How much benefit would there be to buying a second and a RAID controller for RAID 0? I'm suspecting the impact would be too low to justify >100% increase in cost.

2. Should I set up the drive as one big partion, or create seperate partitions for the OS and for games? How much difference does that make?

 

[Rommel44]

RAID0 will improve your performance in some applications but its not worth it - I want buy 4 320GB Seagates and use Raid 5 so even if 1 of them break i wont lose any data.
If I were you I´d use them in JBOD (Just Bunch Of Disks)

 

[savvy]

It's up to you.

The difference is minimal at first glance, but if you have separate partitions, formatting is easier and you can be "neat" with a parition for the OS, games, data, backups, etc.

 

[Bobthelost]

1) Not much in performance terms, if you want more storage room too then it's a viable option, then you hit data reliablity issues.

2) I do it as several partitions, Data and OS. Merely for organisational reasons and for backups etc.

 

[Modular]

I'd recommend making at least one partition for OS. That way you can format that partition at will and reinstall the OS without losing any data. There are plenty of reasons to format the OS about once a year or so. XP gets "gummy" over time and re-installing the OS can help alot.