Best Setup For HDD & partitions?????

Here is my personal experience, for what its worth. I have 3 computers in my office and one for gaming. On my business computers, I use hard drives of 80gb to 100gb for the OS and base programs such as anti-virus software, and a separate hard drive for everything else, no drive being partitioned. In this fashion, if the OS gets corrupted, I can reinstall the OS without loosing any data, and I can add or subtract the number of data hard drives without bothering the hard drive with the OS on it.

On my gaming computer, I have only two partitions. The C: partition has the OS and the D: partition has everything else. Again, if I need to reinstall the OS, the data remains safe and is not lost during the install.

In your case, I would either buy a small hard drive of 80-100gb for the OS and base programs, and use the 640gb drive as a single D: drive for everything else, or I would partition the 640gb drive into a C: drive of 100gb and leave the rest as a single drive. There's really not need to break the secondary drive into several partitions.

Salilor and HeavyGine have some very goog points.

I have 4 HDD's ( two Raid0 pairs. one is total of 600 Gigs, the 2nd is 500 Gigs) I know slighty over kill.

First drive:
C: Win XP Pro and programs. - 50 Gigs (30 Gigs used)
D: Page file for XP and Vista
E: My Data/files and Back up for 2nd drive
2nd Drive
F: Vista 32 and programs - 60 Gigs (currently only using 18 gigs)
NOTE: This becomes C Drive when booting to Vista and XP becomes D:
G: Movies/vista files/pictures and Backup for 1st HDD

Rational - Approx 10 to 15 % of drive (This will be outer edge which is faster. Followed be 8 to 10 Gig for file. This is also close to the outer edge and it prevents it from being stuck in midle of program files and reduces fragmentation.

My laptop - Just got a 250 gig drive to put XP Pro on it (recieve tomarrow. Plan on 50 gig system/programs followed with a 8 gig partition and the remaider for data.

If you get a small drive and a large drive - use Sailer's recommendation, Put your OS and programs on it. On the 2nd larger drive, use Heaveyginge Idea, Make your first partition around 8 gigs and point your pagefile to this
Then leave the rest (E Drive for data and / or games

Note sure, but if wrong I'm sure someone will correct me.

(1) Vista does a defrag in the background (some turn this feature off to boost performance). However; with the page file on its own little partition, there is less fragmentation, thus less time spent defraging it.

(2) Space to allocate - Highly dependentent on individual. How many programs. One way is to look at current system (assuming this is not your 1st computer) and add about 20 Gigs. Most likey, 50 to 60 gigs.

(3) For free space I like at least 10%, When I hit that mark I start looking at deleting files, or addig another drive. Reason - When you do a defrag, files are writen temporarily to free space while wiles are moved. Many of the so called good defrag programs such as Nortons are not as good as their older versions. Ie older versions would not only defrag, but also move files so that they where contigous (Not spelled correct). Newer version leave a few files scattered. Not sure how effient Vista's defrag program is
BUT it is an Improvement over XP and is better than may of the 3rd party programs (Ref PCMaxium mag.

How do you point the pagefile to this drive?

I'm doing the same thing as the OP but I already have two drives.

I have a 120GB drive (but, from an older generation, still SATA, though). It's at least three years old (or more) and another one, 500GB which was bought this year.

I am re-configuring everything since I got a retail version of XP. However, I was wondering if it matters which drive to use with a Windows OS. Since Windows needs a lot of re-fragmenting and there are often differences in boot-up speed, reading/writing and how Windows utilizes disk space, it probably matters which drive one uses.

I also want to have multiple operating systems (Linux) so that is a factor in the disk size and need to have a fast drive that can boot up a OS quite quickly.

What should I do?

I am thinking about either selling the 120GB or keeping it as another storage drive. I would then shop for a drive to be the main OS drive. The 500GB drive would be one storage drive and I'd add another 1TB or 500GB drive later on to be used in an enclosure for a 'back up' drive.

Does this make sense? The 500GB is a Samsung HD. The 120GB is a Seagate although it's a Barracuda, I believe it's one of the earlier ones. What method works best? I think the operating systems would be around 20GB each and probably 5 or 6 at least installed. XP always gets filled with stuff since Windows likes to save/write files/directories to 'C' so I thought it shouldn't be less than 30GB (maybe 40GB?). Therefore, the drive with operating systems would be at the very least, 120GB so the Seagate is actually too small for this setup, anyway?

Comments? Recommendations? Please help soon! ;-) I am shopping for a new drive, regardless, and welcome recommendations there, too. I am thinking of the WD 6400AAKS since it's supposed to be a fast drive and if I decide to use it as an OS drive, it can do the job. One other concern is having a drive for operating systems being so large. It's not a good idea to partition such a large drive which holds OS's and have data on the same HDD (even though, it'd be in another partition on that drive), right? It's better to have a separate HDD for the data?