Last message on previous page:
440bx.....this is my very first post to this forum and it is your words which promted me into action.

Thanks for the fantastic info.

I am in the process of planning my next build (4th build) and the hard drives is an area I have been a bit confused by....in the past I only bothered to have one HD with with two partitions (one part for the OS and Apps and the other storage). I now realise I should have made more of an effort.

What would you propose I purchase as the optimum set of drives for "Jack of All Trades" PC (a bit of gaming, a bit video storage, a fair bit mp3 storage / multimedia, a little bit of video editing) ? I have limit of around 200 - 250 USD for the drives.

The guts of the build spec so far....
> Core 2 E6600
> ASUS GF 7900GT
> ASUS P5W-DH or similar
> 2 GB PC 5400 RAM

I had in mind a 80 or 120 GB 7200rpm drive for the OS etc and 300 or 400 GB 7200rpm Storage Drive. I now plan to partition them as you propose.

Seagate vs Maxtor (or Other) and why ?
Have the feeling Raid is not worth it ?
I guess SATA II ?

Any other comments also welcome of course.

If you really want to RAID your drives.... do so to a few of these Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA2 drives.

You're very welcome. I'm pleased you and others have found it useful.

Depending on your priority, and keeping the cost at least close to your budget, here are the options I'd consider,

For best speed and a "decent" amount of storage, I'd go with a 74GB raptor WD740ADFD and likely a 320GB Western Digital WD3200YS. This configuration is a bit more than $250 but can be had for under $300. The raptor is to give your system the maximum speed you can get, the WD3200YS is to give you a lot of reliable storage.

For maximum storage, I'd probably go with two WD3200YS. This configuration can be had for about $250.

I'll be more detailed in my next post (sometime tomorrow). I had a long Monday that is ending now in Tuesday evening. I'll probably be more lucid tomorrow anyway.

Cool...thanks !

Hi Zog,

About RAID, the most common RAID setups are RAID 0 and RAID 1.

RAID 0 is mostly used to gain as much speed as possible. I am *not* fond of RAID 0 because it

doubles the chances of data loss. If one drive fails, data is lost and the system is down for a substancial amount of time. Due to the unreliable nature of RAID 0, I never recommend it, regardless of speed gains (which tend to be modest anyway).

RAID 1 is used to increase reliabilty. In RAID 1, one drive is the mirror of the other. The system can keep operating even if one drive fails. RAID 1 will result in a performance gain during disk reads and a performance penalty during disk writes. The gain or loss of speed in the system depends on which, reads or writes, are more common. Generally speaking, I like RAID 1 but I dislike that so much space on the drive is "wasted".

With 2 hard drives and a little discipline, it is possible to configure a system that will have most of the reliability of RAID 1 and most of the speed of RAID 0.

With 2 drives, I'd configure the system roughly this way.

Drive 1 - Raptor 70GB (74 "marketing" gigabytes)

Partition C - Label "R74 System A" - 4 GB - 1st Windows installation
Partition D - Label "Pagefile A" - 6 GB - for pagefile and temp files
Partition E - Label "R74 System B" - 8 GB - Working Windows installation
Partition F - Label "R74 Programs A" - 30 GB - for programs
Partition G - Label "R74 Data A" - 12 GB - for Data
Partition H - Label "R74 Attic A" - 10 GB - for seldom accessed files

Total 70GB

Drive 2 - WD3200YS 298GB (320 "marketing" gigabytes)

Partition C - Label "Y30 System C" - 4 GB - Mirror of "System A"
partition D - Label "Y30 Pagefile B" - 6 GB - same use in drive 1
partition E - Label "Y30 System D" - 8 GB - Windows Installation for testing
partition F - Label "Y30 Programs B" - 50 GB - " " " "
partition G - Label "Y30 Data B" - 80 GB - " " " "
partition H - Label "Y30 Attic B" - 150 GB - " " " "

Total 298GB

This is how I would split those drives if they were going into one of my systems. Note that I make the partitions for "programs" quite large, this is because I use a *lot* of *very large* programs. I have a total of 80GB just for programs, this may be more than what you need, only you really know how much space you might really need. If you decide to make the "programs" partitions smaller, add the space to the "data" partitions.

The "Attic" partitions serve multiple purposes, one is to segregate the slowest part of the drive. People don't realize how much of a difference this makes. Actively using the end part of a hard drive guarantees having a system that will be significantly slower than it would be if that part was either not used or, used little. Another purpose of the Attic partitions is to
provide space for backup files you will need in case you have to recover from a sofware or hardware problem.

Note also, the partitions labelled "pagefile" should be FAT32 not NTFS. This gives you a little extra performance at no cost as far as reliability is concerned.

The "Y30 System D" or (Y30 System 4 - if you prefer to enumerate them instead of alphabetizing them) is meant for test purposes. Very often I download software that someone recommended. I don't install it in my working Windows installation, I install it in this "test" installation. If the software is good and, I end up being really interested in keeping it then it makes it to my working installation otherwise, it ends up being discarded at some point. This Windows installation is "disposable" I refresh it using a ghost image file quite often.

In the Attic partitions I keep a ghost image of "System A","B", "C" and "D". This allows me to recover from a non-bootable Windows installation easily. I also keep images of "Programs A" and "Programs B" for which I create a new ghost image every once in a while. Everytime I create new images of "Programs A" and "Programs B", I also create a new image of "R74 System B".

There is one downside to the setup I've suggested here. There is enough space on "Y30 Attic B" to keep a backup/"ghost image" of "R74 Data A" but there is *not* enough space to keep a backup of "Y30 Data B" anywhere. I'd back that up on an external drive or on DVDs.

In "R74 Programs A", I would install the programs that are very slow to load (usually large programs) and install the smaller programs on "Y30 Programs B". The idea is to balance the load and to use the fastest drive for the programs that are slowest to load while using the slower drive to load programs that load faster (usually because they are smaller.)

Force the pagefile to be in "Y30 Pagefile B". The "Y74 Pagefile A" will actually be unused. If you ever have a hardware problem on the "Y30" drive then you will need (and use) the "Y74 Pagefile A".

One thing that has nothing to do with partitions but, is absolutely great to have is Virtual Machine software like VMWare or Virtual PC. This can spare you from having a "Windows installation for testing" since you can test software in a Virtual machine. This eliminates the hassle of having to reboot to get into the test installation since a Virtual machine can be started and closed at anytime. Another great convenience afforded by a Virtual Machine is that you don't need to have an anti-virus, anti-spyware, pop-up blocker, etc installed in your main Windows installation because you use a VM (Virtual Machine) that has the anti-virus and anti-whatever stuff loaded to go on the net. if you happen to get a virus, spyware, trojans or any other kind of crudware, no sweat, it will be gone as soon as you close the VM. Of course, you keep a backup of the initial VM installation in the "Attic" partitions so you can refresh it quickly and often. I'd use the "R74 Attic A" for that. Note that you need a fair amount of memory to have a VM running while keeping your real system responsive. 2GB is plenty enough. For Internet access I use a VM with 384MB of RAM dedicated to it and that works fine.

Other important notes,

1. You actually need to install Windows from scratch in partitions C & E. You *cannot* use Ghost or other software to "copy"/image C to E. It won't work and if you force it work, it still won't work (the registry in use will not be the correct one and there is no way around this problem)

2. Create all your Windows installations on the first drive (in this case R74). Do this *without* any other drive connected to the system (don't have the Y30 drive connected to the system)

3. Configure your Windows C & E installations and create a ghost image of C, save it in "R74 Attic" (temporarely)

3. When you are all done, the letters assigned to the partitions on the second drive will *not* be as I showed them. You will have to use "Disk Management" to assign them better drive letters than Windows will. I suggest one of these two configurations,

Partition C - "R74 System A"
Partition D - "Y30 Pagefile B"
Partition E - "R74 System B"
Partition F - "R74 Programs A"
Partition G - "Y30 Programs B"
Partition H - "R74 Data A"
Partition I - "Y30 Data B"
Partition J - "R74 Attic A"
Partition K - "Y30 Attic B"
Partition L - "Y30 System C"
Partition M - "Y30 System E"
Partition N - "R74 Pagefile B"

The above configuration groups the partitions by usage, e.g, program, data and attic partitions together, the first one of the group is always on the faster drive, the second one on the slower and larger drive.

The second configuration would simply be having the partitions sequential, first all the partitions on drive R74 with letters C, D, E, F, G, H, followed by the partitions on Y30 with letters I, J, K, L, M, N. Personally, I prefer the former over the latter.

Another note about drive letters, I always assign my CD/DVD burner the letter W (for "Write" ), the next optical drive the following letter, drive X. I assign letter V to any virtual CD/DVD, for instance, my VirtualCloneDrive is letter V (for "virtual" ). That way all the drives of a "kind" are grouped together when in Windows Explorer.

This is a lot of information and re-reading it, I regret that it is not really all that well organized. I can walk you thru the installation step-by-step when you are ready to assemble your new machine.

HTH.

G'day HTH,

Again...thanks for taking the time to provide me with excellent info.

I am holding off untill wk 33 to buy everything as my brother will be visiting the country and he also wants to partake in the build (also allows a bit of time for the Core 2s to filter into Thailand and the price to stabilise).

Between now and then, a couple more questions come to mind.

In your proposed setup there are 3 Windows systems:
> Are you using a 3rd party boot manager (if yes which one) ?
> Can the three systems share the same page file or do you allocate a chunk of "Y30 Pagefile B" to each (if yes, how much) ?
> Instead of having the "Y30 System D" Testing Install, could you not just Ghost before, use the main install, then roll back if there is a problem ? It crossed my mind that problems with new software are often related to their interaction with other applications other than Windows and the test install may not have all the same software installed on it as the main system....VM sounds good. I guess it depends a bit on how often you try something new, and how many new things you are trying at once.

Hungry for information,

Zog

I have 2x200GB and it's really small for me

I cant ever have enough. I always donwload something from the net. I was thinking about buying two more and connect them in RAID 5

well if u don't use alot of hard disk space then get 2 smaller hard disk space (eg. 2x 60Gb Hard disk = 120Gb ) instead of one large sized space.

then use one for the normal installation ( o/s, programs and documents etc. ) and use the other one for backup. ( keep only in your backup docs., mp3s, videos pics etc (Not the o/s )). May also download an automated backup wizard .

or else if u very keen on seting a Raid, riad the harddisks.

You're welcome.

I think waiting for the prices to stabilize is a good idea. They will probably be cheaper and availability greater in a few weeks.

Actually there are 4, not 3. "System A" thru "System D".

"R74 System A" and "Y30 System C" should be mirrors of each other. These are the two installations that help you take care of a hard drive problem (because they reside on different hard drives). They are also the Windows installations where tools and utilities that would help you recover from a Windows crash reside (antivirus, data recovery, norton ghost, etc).

"R74 System B" is your main installation (on the fastest drive.)

"Y30 System D" (which due to a typo I incorrectly labelled "Y30 System E" ) is the Windows "trial" installation. This is a "throw away" installation which gets refreshed from a ghost image file as needed.

No third party boot manager is needed. The Windows 2000 and Windows XP boot manager knows how to handle booting from multiple Windows installations.

All of the Windows installations share the same pagefile partition which in all cases is drive D (Y30 Pagefile). Nothing is required on your part to make this happen except for telling every Windows installation to place its pagefile on that partition. Every time Windows is booted it will inspect the pagefile, if it doesn't like it (because it was created by another Windows installation) it will automatically delete it and create a new one.

Yes, you could do that. If you choose to do it that way you will have to create a ghost image of your Windows installation first. If you decide you don't like the software then you'll need to restore from that image.

If you decide to have a Testing installation, you don't have to create a new image before you install the software (you should already have the original image saved in one of the Attic partitions). If I don't like the software, I don't re-image immediately, I simply ignore it and keep using that installation for testing until it becomes bloated, then and only then, do I use the original ghost image to "refresh" it. In other words, I may install 20 programs on this installation before I bother to reset it back to its original state. This is a lot less work and less dangerous than using your working installation to determine if you like or dislike a new piece of software.

Interactions among applications are most common among applications that install drivers. Applications that install drivers are actually not that common, the ones that do are usually the ones that intend to manage some of the hardware on the system (e.g, Nero and Easy Media Creator) and those are usually easy to identify.

If an application does *not* install any drivers, it is very unlikely to have unexpected interaction with another application that does *not* install any drivers either.

Virtual Machines are simply great. I can have my main Windows installation running at top speed because it runs without an antivirus, antispyware and anti-whatever. I surf the net from a VM which is discarded as soon as I'm done (along with all the viruses, trojans, spyware and whatever crud may or may not be there).

If you have VMs or a partition that you know you can throw away whenever you like, it is likely you'll find yourself trying more software because you don't have to worry about undesirable consequences.

Bon appetit!

Hey, I'm going to build my next PC except this time it's for me ! So anyway, I'm unsure as to how many HDD's I should have and the benefit over having several hard drives to partition instead of one, larger drive. Also backups aren't a priority of mine if it takes multiple partitions. My machine will be gaming first and multimedia and documents second. What would be the ideal partitioning setup I should use?