HDD and Windows Performance?

[RWB]

At the moment I have a 160GB WD 8MB Cache SATA drive and a 40GB 2MB Cache Maxtor PATA133 drive, I have an order coming in for a 250GB 8MB Cache Maxtor SATA drive.

I'm going to be doing a full clean install when I get the drive simply becuase things have gone to crap for me and I have too much junk which I am sorting out right now, most of it was destroyed when I tried merging partitions on the 40GB drive.

The question I have is on which drive should I install Windows onto, I am no longer going to be using any partitions, instead I'll just install everything the good old fashioned way of C:\Program Files\<Program Name> to keep things simple. A part of me feels like installing Windows onto the 160GB drive, using the 40GB drive as page file/swap, and the 250GB drive for my video editing and other digital media stuffs. However, another part feels that the 250GB drive is denser and thus would give me the best performance if I have my prgrams and games and of course windows installed on it instead.

What do you all think? In the near future, like in 2 or 3 months, I am planning on buying more drives to create a RAID array for faster and more secure storage. I think a RAID 0+1 would require 4 drives correct?

Those are the basic questions I have right now, thanks for any advice.

[yagga]

I would say ditch the 40 gb. I would do this because it is so incredibly small compared to the other drives. It also may be slower with the 2mb cache (though I don't think I notice based on cache) and it runs pata, which not neccessarily makes it slower, but I myself would rather have 100% sata in a system. The 40gb drive probably is loud too, because your bigger drives probably have FDB motors and I don't think any 40s had them.

So, leaving the 160 and 250 I would probably put windows on the 160. Even if the 250 is denser I doubt you could tell a difference. I would do this because windows and games and programs don't take up much space. Leave the 250 for the stuff that takes up massive amounts of space. I am not sure about the page file performance in test wise and benchmarks, but my experience is that it makes no difference no matter where it is, so I'd just leave it on the 160.

Now, about your raid. Do what you wish, but I still won't trust raid for security (at home), as something goes wrong in the raid setup you lose everything anyway. I would personally just have an individual, or 2 drives that are backup if you want security. If you want performance, go right ahead and raid 0 them up. I want to get into raid 0 ing some drives up, but I don't have any matching drives that I want to do this with. For the security, I am sure there is software or something to automatically back stuff up so that you don't have to manually save the same files multiple times. But I have yet to actually search for and use this software I speak of. I was just throwing my thoughts together here, hope you understood them all.

[RWB]

My system is loud period, why would I get rid of a perfectly good drive? Although I do plan on buying an external casing for it so I can have some external storage for various things.

[yagga]

An external drive would be good. :)

[MediaMan]

RWB


A bit of bedtime reading for you (http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=281) before you go making one big honkin' 160 GB partition. Simple it may be but it's a sure fire method to foobar yourself for data preservation.