Hello, I require some assistance. I recently decided to thin out some of my harddrives (3 IDE) for a bigger SATA drive (300 GB SATA MaxLine III). Now, basically my question is what should I do? Does I have to set up RAID? I was under the impression that RAID was really for multiple drives, so does it make sense to set it up for this? Or does it have to be set up as raid because it's SATA? IT doesn't have to be my boot drive, although I suppose it makes sense for the fastest drive to be the OS's drive, but I'm not sure if I want to re-install and start from scratch with all my programs etc. installed. It was an OEM drive, so unfortunately it didn't come with any docs. It's set up, it was "unallocated" under windows disk management, but some windows auto-setup took care of that. It still has not been formatted or ready to use in windows yet (an option after right-clicking it to set it up under windows). I'm just wondering, if this was your drive, how you would set it up (remember, this is my first SATA drive, and for some reason I'm under the impression that these things are greatly dirfferent than the normal IDEs I'm used to. I have an MSI Neo2 Platinum mobo. All your advice is appreciated! Thanks! Rege
Don't need to set up a RAID or anything, it'll be fine as it is. Just take note that if you're setting up windows on it you'll need a floppy disk with the SATA drivers on it (see your mobo manual)
yes as said use the floppy. then when windows setup gets to it, best to delete the drive partition if its already been setup as just one patrition, then create a 15GB partition dedicated to just the OS. after windows is installed go to control panel,admin tools,comp management,disk management and create separate partitons for games, apps, storage and a 2GB partiton for pagefile. by separate partitons they will be faster when accessed and defragging is so much quicker. make sure to go to control panel,system,advanced,performance settings,advanced,virtula memory,change and set your pagefile partiton to your pagefile and disable the one auto allocated on OS partiton. after restart you can go to part where OS is,tools,folder options and unhide system/hidden files then delete the pagefile.sys as you wont be using it...............phew. edit:fast typing dyslexia.
indeed, such a big drive should be partitioned.. even small drives should have its own page file partition also, because of partitioning, you'll never have to do mass back ups ever again, just move all the stuff you want to keep (os independant ofcourse, so no installed apps) to the documents partition, and only format the os and programs partitions for a fresh install and its true about defragging, being able to do one drive at a time is brilliant, and its usually a page file which frags up a drive, so with that being seperate, it cant do that to the rest of the drive
Thanks guys, especially Baldick for such a thorough answer. Yeah, I currently have a 175GB as my main drive, which I believe I have setup into roughly 5 or so partitions (OS, OS2, games, apps.. and another drive 80GB for misc, and video production). Good idea for the pagefile, too. Would there be any hinderence if I made it a bigger partition and used it as my scratch disks for my development apps.. I would assume not? Cool, thanks again, never used SATA before, so I figured I'd jump on the bandwagon. Rege
Keep at least one IDE drive, you can do a quick daily backup of all new or changed files to it, just in case.
Quick point, if your gonna stick the swap/page partiton on the same drive as the OS/Apps etc its kinda pointless.... Why, well the point of giving its its own partition is to speed up reads/writes to it. By sticking it on the same disc as windows/apps, whenever a large app loads and needs to write swap its still going to have to access the same disc to do this. It doesnt give anywhere near the perfornance "boost" (in reality you dont gain a massive amount) of running the swap on a seperate (physical) drive to the boot.
