So I just recieved the following Hard drives:

150 gig Sata1 Raptor, Seagate Sata2 500gig. I Installed XP PRO to the raptor, and formatted the 500gig with the xp Disk Management.

This is my first time owning 2 Hard Drives in one computer, and have the following questions:

1. How do spyware, antivirus sweeps work when you have 2 hard drives? Do I need special programs to do so?

2. Is there a performance hit and or gain if I run games on the 500gig, as opposed to the raptor with the OS installed?

3. What programs / Files would [i]you put on the Raptor, and the Seagate?

4. What hard drive should I put my swap file to?

5. What kind of games / programs would benifit from bieng run off of the raptor?

All I can think of for now, any other FYI info / Tips would be much appreciated!!!!!


Thank Ahead!


-Chris Coker

The best way to do it is to put your OS and all programs on the Raptor and use the 2nd drive for storage, i.e., keep all your data files on the second drive. Your antivirus program will recognize the 2nd drive and will protect it. When you do a virus scan make sure the 2nd drive is included, which it should be by default. You won't get any performance boost installing programs on the 2nd drive and if you have to reinstall Windows, you'll have to reinstall all the programs. Make sure you set your defaults folders to the 2nd hdd, i.e., not to Documents Settings on the C drive, which is generally the default folder. Generally when you install a program it will let you say where you want to store stuff. Other programs let you designate where to save files while you're using them.

1. Windows install + swap file (windows default swap) + programs files (system files only) on the raptor. If you have enough memory then the swap shouldnt matter much anyways.

2. all other programs/games on a dedicated "installed programs" PARTITION on your 500gb drive.

3. data/iso images on another PARTITION on your 500gb drive.

4. adaware/antivirus should scan both drives when you do a full scan. I dont think the automatic scanning of internet traffic/email cares about how many drives you have since malicious code should be stopped before it can reach any harddrive (ideally anyways).

just my 2 cents

cheers all, I love this site!

cool, I think its to late to do the partition .. ugh I already installed a few games and moved my music / pics onto.

Raptor: Windows and ALL programs
Seagate: All your data

As g-paw said, if you have to reinstall Windows, you will have to install all programs anyway, so installing them to the Seagate won't make a difference anyway.

Suggest you get Partition Magic, which allows for creating and resizing partitions once Windows is installed, does a lot of other things as well. Very good program for managing hdd. Very reliable program

Well I have been installing most of my games, musc, pics, ducuments to the Seagate because there is more room (500)gigs .. I installed XP, PS CS2, and a few others on the raptor ... Gonna save the room for Newer games and mmorpg's. Heh is there a way to not have to make a folder every time I install some thing to my Seagate (Non xp drive) : / kinda annoying lol.

videos benefit more from higher rpm (raptor) than games, theres no difference in fps with games with 7200rpm and 10000rpm

I disagree but ok. (MMORPG'S)

1. In a full scan, it usually scans both, except of course if you specify only one. But the active scanner in a typical anti-virus would scan the files that you access regardless of the drive and some other files.

2. The only performance gain (on the Raptor) that I could forsee is a little bit on the load times. Also probably when you open initially a game, it'd probably get to the main menu a little bit faster.

3. Raptor: Windows, Games (Though if the games are 8+ GB then it'd fill up the raptor pretty quickly)
Seagate: Documents, videos, music, other files

Only reason you'd install to the Seagate is if you don't have enough space on the Raptor.


4. Well you could put the swap file into the seagate, though the raptor is faster. I'd suggest that you keep it at the Raptor. Also I've seen little to no difference when putting the swap file in a dedicated drive. Though this may be different when you got little ram and swap file gets used. (But since you got a raptor i'd assume you got the money to buy a lot more ram).

5. Games that would benefit would be the games that have insane loading times (30 seconds or more on a 7200 drive). Prime examples would include Stalker and Splinter Cell: Double Agent.

Videos? Are you talking about video editing or just plain videos? The prob with video editing is that if you tend to keep the quality very high (video source), then the files would tend to be large (10GB or so). As the raptor has limited capacity you'd immediately hit the capacity limit and probably be forced to move it to the 7200 anyway.

Thanks! Yea I dont wanna fill the raptor up : / ... I am only putting MMORPG's and games with longer loading times.