How many hard drives can WinXp support?

[feurio]

I'm planning to buy a third hard drive, just for the Windows paging file,
but I'm afraid this will slow down the system (meaning the third hard
drive). Should I worry about it or not?
Thanks

 

[Al Dykes]

I'm planning to buy a third hard drive, just for the Windows paging file,
but I'm afraid this will slow down the system (meaning the third hard
drive). Should I worry about it or not?
Thanks

XP will support more disks than you can afford. Your motherboard will
be the first limit you will reach.

But lets take one step back. How do you know you need a seperate disk
for the pagefile or that the same money is better spent on memory or
that neither will speed your application up to any perceptable amount.
You didn't give us much information.

 

[feurio]

XP will support more disks than you can afford. Your motherboard will
be the first limit you will reach.

But lets take one step back. How do you know you need a seperate disk
for the pagefile or that the same money is better spent on memory or
that neither will speed your application up to any perceptable amount.
You didn't give us much information

Thanks for your reply. Well, here's my specs:
Pentium 4 with HT 3Gz on Gigabyte 8KNXP, 2Gb of RAM, 128Mb Vram. Second
drive is "dynamic" (I could conver it to basic, but would have to reformat
first; also I have a lot of activity on that drive includinf a Photoshop
page file, so I decided to buy a third smal drive just for the swap file).

 

[Guest]

You significant question should be how to locate the pagefile.

If you have a typical Mobo with 2 X IDE Controllers, it benefits little to
run more than 4 hard drives.

Partitioning will provide 'logical' devices, however the performance
limitations are the number of controllers: both IDE Controllers and the Hard
Dsk Controller s [cards on the IDE Drive]. Basically each one can manage
only one instruction at a time.

Thus if your Operating System and Applications are on the C Drive -
connected to IDE0, then you will gain some benefit if the Pagefile is on a
second Drive [D Drive] which is connected to IDE1. Such that where I/O is
taking place on the C Drive, there is an overlap for I/O to take place on the
D Drive.

Of course you need to consider the memory BUS and system BUS, but suffice to
say there is a benefit.

Now if you have 3 drives [physical or logical] and the Pagefile is on the
third drive [itself a 'slave' on IDE0 or the second partition of Drive0] then
if the first drive is busy, then if either or both the IDE controller and the
Hard Drive controller are already busy, there is no advantage is moving the
Pagefile.

Clear as mud? I hope not.

 

[feurio]

Thanks, Bar. Actually, I'm going to connect the third drive to my second
onboard IDE/Raid controller. How about that?