Re: Multiple Hard Drive Advice

Dermot wrote:
I am trying to gain a better understanding of all the practical options available to me and the inter-relation ship between O/S and Applications.

I would appreciate suggestion regarding the practical advantages / disadvantages of any configuration of the hard drives that would be worth considering with respect to sensible use of my drives as I wrongly though I could install OS on one drive Applications on the second and data in the third......reinstalling the OS on one occasion meant the system could not see the Applications on the other drive...so I had to re install them all anyway.

Can anyone advise me what is the most practical way to configure a PC which has three hard drives installed on it. 20GB, 40GB and 80GB.

From the point of view of a fault and recovering from it, so am I best to
1. Install the OS (XP Pro) and all applications on one drive (Primary Partition)

2. Use the other two for data backup (Logical Partitions).

Any help / Links ....would be appreciated

Thanks in advance


Put the OS on the fastest drive. 25 to 30 GIG is plenty for XP now and most likely 5 years down the line, it does tend to grow. Putting your applications on another drive or partition doesn't do anything for you. That is where you're backups go.

Personally I like to make C: just a bootstrap partition and install the OS(es) elsewhere, but that is just me, and if one OS will do for you then unnecessary. But I will say that a backup OS sure comes in handy if the one you normally use goes tits up and you don't have a spare comp about to Google for a fix or download a replacement for a corrupt file.

Since you have more than one drive I would recommend using a dedicated swap file (pagefile) on a drive that does not contain an OS and is otherwise only used occasionally for backup. And in fact prefer a dedicated smallish partition for the swap file so that it doesn't intermingle with other data and get fragmented who knows where on the drive. The reduced head movement to access a swap file guarantied to be in a limited area and two drives running in parallel may only speed things up a small amount, but every little bit helps. And since you have the resources you may as well use them to you're advantage.

John
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