Is there any benifit having seperate a Hard Drives for the OS only?

IMO what is the best/easiest setup is a smallish fast drive (ie, 36GB ADFD Raptor) as an OS and apps drive (single partition) and large 7200rpm drives for storage and games.

 

I can personally attest to this, £420 and counting...

 

My aim is too have a 36 gig raptor for OS and one 36 gig raptor for apps.

I have a large drive for data and im not so bothered about its speed.

So its 2 new raptors I need then

EDIT Acctually on reading back through this very thread would I not be better of getting the 74 gig version and partitioning them?

Is there any sort of performence hit partitions v 2 seperate drives?

EDIT 2 - there doesnt seem to be any diff in spec with the diff models according to this
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Western_Digital_SATA.html

 

2 36GB raptors would be faster than a single 74GB raptor, given that they can theoretically dish out double the IOps (though of course they won't be twice as fast in any real world situation)

Whether its worth the cost though, probably not.

Is there any reason you can't just put your OS and apps on a single 36GB raptor (with a single partition)?

The only difference between the WD360ADFD and the WD740ADFD is the capacity.

 

Yeah the diff is about £60 too. Ill probs go for the two partitions...or not

If your refering to the link I posted to over clockers they have the raptors and raptor 2's there on the page. The specs are similar to say the least.

Are raptor 2s any better than raptor 1s?

Would I see any imporvment in load times on BF2 and the like with a raptor over a 7200 drive?

 

The drives with the model number ending in ADFD are far faster than the drives ending in GD.

The difference is the platter density, actuator design, firmware, electronics - everything. The ADFD model is quieter, cooler and faster.

As I said, they are a completely different drive. The written specs you see in shops for different 7200rpm drives from different manufacturers are near identical, though performance can vary greatly between them

You're unlikely to see much of a difference in BF2 load times between a raptor and a current generation 7200rpm drive.

 

doesn't it also make you a bit securer from getting spyware/viruses targetted as seperate partititons instead of a single with all programs on which would spread and infect that drive/partition?

 

OK Thanks for explaining it all to me.

I think Ill opt for two 36Gig raptors. The newer models with 16meg cache.

One final Q - does the SATA cable make a diff or is one cable the same as another these days?
I just remember when shuttle gave out naff SATA cables with various models.

 

I don't expect that having a different partition for OS and for apps would be so different to having them in one partition, in both cases OS and apps would be in different physical parts of disk and in both cases if you had enough memory almost all data would be handled just in memory. Really I don't see any benefit in doing that either; I think you need only an OS-apps-games partition and a data partition.
Am I right?

 

Best Hard Drive Partioning Strategy

I am building a new pc, and I have 4 320GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 series SATA drives.

I've built hundreds of computers, but I really want the best hard drive partitioning strategy for this one.

Should I take 1 320GB and partion it with say 50GB for the OS , or leave the entire first drive for the 320GB, 1 drive for Programs/Games, 1 for Media..

I'd really like the optimal setup for fast read/write and seek times, I could go raid as well with the ASUS P5B deluxe mobo I am going to put it, but would like any suggestions from others ...

Thanks
Brian

 

How much storage do you actually need? With four drives that size you could run a RAID 1 array which gives 640GB of storage and maximum data security. It is a tad on the wasteful side though.

The mobo supports RAID 5 but according to the storage guru Mr Tad running raid 5 on the motherboard is pretty CPU-intensive.

Oh, and welcome to bit-tech, brian

 

Reaper, did you mean raid 1 or raid 0+1.

0+1 would give better performance and practically as much redundancy.

 

I hadn't actually thought of that. I looked up the mobo on the asus site and the RAID options it gave were 0, 1, 5 and 10 but I missed out the 10 completely.

A RAID 10 or 1+0 would work better than a RAIR 0, this is true. In terms of what extra processing power that uses, ask Dr Tad