SATA question
 

Hi guys, I just bought a 200gb SATA hard drive, which I will be adding to my puny 40gb drive (and throwing the old piece of junk HD I had in a server). My question is, what would be the optimal configuration for these two drives? The SATA is 7200rpm, and I'm not sure on the 40gb, but I would think it is as well.

What I was thinking is partitioning the 200gb SATA into a 160 and 40, booting from the 40gb partition (I was told you can't use SATA drives as slave drives, is this true?), using the IDE drive just for installed programs, and the huge chunk for data storage. Is this a good set-up, or is there a better combination that I haven't thought of? Any input would be greatly appreciated.

I'd just leave the SATA non-partitioned and install Windows and every other program on there. It'll speed up your PC big time. Use the IDE for storage or whatever. If you have SATA available, installing programs and Windows on it is a must because of the speed factor. I can't stand partitioning (too many fuckin problems with it), so I'd leave both drives as they are.

-Lasereth

no no no, make sure you make partitions on it. Make a15 gig partition for the system and then split the rest in half.

This will allow you to format the 15 gig when ever you need to redo your system, but allowing you to copy all the files off of it onto the second or third partition.

You never want to have as one large partition, its just not a good practice. Having multiple partitions allows you much more flexibility.

I've always had weird errors when using partitions. He has a 40 GB HDD that he can save important files with, so I figured partioning was useless. Of course, if you're into the whole partition deal, it's always an option!

-Lasereth

I bought a 120GB SATA, and have three 40G partitions. None of them are near being full...yet. Boot off of your SATA drive, you'll enjoy the speed. Leave the IDE drive connected, but make it a slave drive.
Lasereth: what kind of weird errors do you get? That's really interesting.

It is always a good best practice to have virtual memory and OS on seperate physical volumes and....

Sorry to thread jack....but

I'm curious about the wierd partitioning errors as well.

I have never seen or heard of that before unless partition magic was involved.

-bear

I never partition any of my drives. If I get the feeling to have a separate partition I buy another drive and keep it whole. I guess that's why I have over 1.6 TB of total storage space. I used to do the whole OS partition/Data partition/Small pagefile drive/etc - but now it's just too troublesome and didn't seem to be worth it. I wouldn't go more than 2 partitions on that drive if I were you - and only because you "might" want to put your OS on a seperate drive - but if it were me I wouldn't chop it up at all.

As far as using SATA as a slave - I've never seen a SATA channel that supported 2 drives on it - so a SATA drive would always be master - just secondary master or tertiary master... There woudn't be a slave on that channel.

ugh I hate partition magic. I completely fubared one of my drives one time using that shit. I hate it.

I'm not a big Partition Magic fan myself, either. I planned on doing my partitioning within Windows itself, then leaving it alone.

So what seems to be the configuration that would net me the best performance? I know there are two schools of thought here, and I'm leaning towards the partitioning route. I'm comfortable doing it and it helps me more logically arrange my files.

So will it be to my advantage to have the OS and installed programs on different drives? Also, how do I move the page file to a different partition in Windows? I know you can easily do it in Linux, but I have no experience doing this in Windows.

I'm going to add a vote to partitioning the drives.

As far as Vmem goes, it's under
Control Panel\System\Advanced\Performance\Settings\Advanced\Virtual Memory

That's basically the errors I'm talking about. Partitioning the drives is fine, but if you ever want to change that, good luck. I haven't found a program that worked yet, and Partition Magic actually permanently fucked that HDD Redjake is talking about. If you think you'll keep the partitions permanently, then I'd go for it, but I have to advise against it if you think you might change it.

-Lasereth

As has been mentioned, SATA only gets 1 drive per channel. So they are all, in effect, Masters.

Personally, i am in the thought of partitioning and separating files. I usually put ~10GB for windows. This allows windows its room, and plenty of room for whatever programs NEED to be on the same drive. Then i give myself several GB's for swap file, virutal memory, what have you. Dont put anything on that drive, and you will never hafta worry about windows getting PMS on you when it gets low on space. Then spilt the remaining into 2 drives or so. This way it makes backing up files and blowing out windows soooo much easier. I also like to keep things on each drive real organized, so i tend to use several partiotions, 1 for games, 1 for apps/programs, one for downloads and so on.

Boot off of your old drive, and use windows computer managment to partition and format makes things real easy. Plus, you can do a full format to a 200gig SATA, in ~10 seconds. Its so much faster you dont hafta waste a bunch of time with your formatting.