2 hard drives

[Guest]

I'm still able to use my original 20GB Seagate HD first as a primary drive,
then a secondary, and now back as a primary. Reason being is I bought 1 40GB
maxtor after, made that the primary but ran into bad sector problems with it
after 18 mos. I reinstalled windows back to the 20GB and restored it as a
primary.
Now, I just purchased a 80GB and I would first like to know if its still
necessary to retain my reliable 20GB as a second drive?

 

[Gary R.]

I lost a WD 80 GB 3-year warranty drive after about 3 months, so a new drive
doesn't mean it's bulletproof.

If the 20 GB drive is a fast drive, (meaning it's not an old UDMA33 drive
and your system is capable of ATA100 or 133), use it for your windows
swapfile, and also to make backups of important files that you haven't had
time to burn to a CD, downloads, drivers, etc. Having the swapfile on
another drive can speed things up, as well as make defragmenting your main
drive simpler.

Gary

 

[Guest]

Since I will keep the reliable 20gb as a backup drive, should I partition the
80Gb at all? I was advised not too since I now have the 2nd drive. If I am
not mistaken, I heard that by not partitioning, there would be vitual memory
advantages.

 

[Gary R.]

An old principle says the ideal place for the swapfile is the most-used
partition on the least-used drive. If you keep the 20GB in a drawer, not
installed as a second drive, probably the "fastest" is to have the 80 GB
drive unpartitioned. Personally, I don't like having my documents and
photos and movies I'm working on (I'm a photographer) on the same partition
as the operating system. It makes defragmentation more difficult (because
larger files are constantly deleted and added) which may slow things down
more than having the drive move the heads to another partition to access
documents.

For me, what has worked best is to have the operating system on the smaller
drive (provided it's a fast drive) and the larger drive in a single
partition for the swapfile, photos, documents, movies, downloads, etc. This
keeps the heads in the OS drive generally in the area of the operating
system and programs, and the heads on the second drive don't have to keep
moving to access the operating system files.

If I had only an 80 GB drive installed, I'd partition it and keep the OS and
swapfile on the first partition, and other stuff on the larger second one
(unless you use a lot of games, which means you'll need a larger partition
for the OS). Probably the worst situation would be to put the OS on one
partition and the swapfile on the other of the same drive.

Gary