Advice on drive assignments

[izools]

Hey little help needed

I have four hard drives in my system

: WD Raptor WD1500ADFD S-ATA/300 (150Gb, 16M Cache)
: WD Caviar SE WD5000AAJB P-ATA/133 (500Gb, 8M Cache)
: Samsung Spinpoint T166 HD501LJ S-ATA/300 (500Gb, 16M Cache)
: HGST Deskstar T7K250 P-ATA/100 (250Gb, 8Mb Cache)

And I am reinstalling my OS. This will be a single boot machine.

My question is what drive would be best for what? I plan on using one drive for boot, one for installations, one for swap file, and all drives (except boot drive) for storage.

I was planning on going as follows:

Raptor: Boot
Spinpoint: Installs ("Program Files") / Data (Hi-Def Videos, Frequently shared files)
WD Caviar: Swapfile / Data (Std. Def Videos, Music)
HGST Deskstar: Data (HTTP Downloads, Whatever else)

Do you reckon that will give me the best performance out of my drives or would anyone know of a more optimal seup?

FYI rest of system components AXP x2 6000+, 4Gb OCZ 800MHz CL4 RAM, 2x GeForce 8600GTS SLI, Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe, Etc.

Cheers all!

 

[g-paw]

I really don't think there is any point installing OS and programs on different drives/partition. If you have to reinstall Windows, you'll have to reinstall all your programs anyway. If your editing/rendering video, best to have an exclusive drive for this. Doesn't matter where the movies are stored once you're finished with them

 

[izools]

There are certain situations where this can make a huge difference.

E.g: "Checking" Torrents whilst watching a movie / updating programs.
Or playing a game whilst streaming a movie to another machine on the netowork.

Or, having a shedload of apps open and using the swap file, without crippling the performance of other hdd-intensive apps.

There are many situations in which the kind of setup above can be really handy and give you less of those "finger tapping" moments that lessen the experience of using your pc.

I was just wondering if any one else had played about with this and had any useful tips

g-paw - give it a go, seriously!

 

[g-paw]

The reason I said that is there are people who think installing the aps on a different drive means they won't have to reinstall programs with a Windows install. I don't really think it would help me much given the most resource intensive things I do are movie and photo editing/rendering but usually not at the same time. Don't game and seldom download files. Do stream music when photo editing. Besides the above I have my browser, E Mail, and security programs running. Guess like everything else comes down to how you use your machine. I do think it's a good idea to have a separate drive for movie editing, which doesn't have to be that large if your storing your finished videos on another drive. I currently have 4 drives. An OS/program, one for video, one for storage, and a backup