1 hard drive split or 2 seperate drives

Welll.....

If you get 2x 36GB Raptor's you can run them in RAID 0 and still be able to partition the drive. You're performance will increase and you can have 2 logical drives.

From a performance standpoint, putting Windows on one partition and ur programs on another doesn't really do anything.

-mpjesse

Two 36 in RAID 0 is faster, but the 36's cost $100 vs $134 for the 74 GB, which doesn't make then a very good bargin.

You almost have the right idea about using two partitions.

One for OS and one for programs is a bad idea.

One for OS & programs and one for files is a great idea.

You should keep all your files and your destkop folder, my documents folder, email store folder, address book, bookmarks etc on a seperate partition.

Then you can easily backup/restore or do a clean install and not have to worry about losing anything important.

well i guess i should have also said that i have a 250gb drive for all my downloads and files and stuff. i dont really feel like doing a raid setup cause i think the raptors will be fast enough for now. i have always split my drives for programs and window cause i was told a long time ago that it was better for performance and easier to defrag. all i know is i got to get rid of this slow ass drive ( it only has 2mb cache   )

Two drives would be a very nice idea....

You could put the OS and Program files on the boot and run your swap and data on the other....

This is a nice setup and will reward you with good performance. 1 74gb raptor as your sys/app drive and the 250gb as your swap/data drive.

Also forgot that the partitioning would not matter for perfomance as MPJesse said it would however keep things clean and uncluttered and also speed recovery if anything ever happened.

In that case just one big partion then. Unless you want to have another data partition on the OS drive, which is usually a good idea for the following reason.

I often see my friends having just one partition on their OS drive, then start filling that drive with files when their storage drives are full.

Suddenly they can't do regular backups because they have 3+0 GB of downloads on the OS partition. Nor do they want to restore from a backup because they will lose those 30 GB+.

So you probably want to create two partitions just so you are never tempted to use your C: partition for storage!

If you have partition magic you can always make adjustments if you misjudge how much room you need for C:.

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I have yet to see any actual evidence that windows XP benifits from having the page file on a seperate drive.

If you know of any benchmarks that prove me let me know and I will stand corrected.

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