What to do with new HD ..now running 3 drives ...

[embowe]

I really dont know what to do...I have 3 hd's...a 500gig..and two 160 gigs...what would be my best option for setting these up...I am running Vista Ultimate 64bit...4 gig of ram...I have them all installed on my system now...the C drive is 98.2 gig..vista and all my installed programs ..*partitioned off one of the 160's*...my D drive is for my music *50.7 gig, the other part of the 160*....my H drive is the 500gig with my torrents on it (not partitioned) and my I drive are my digital pics *160 gig*...

what should I do..or just leave it alone and be happy with it

 

[UncleDave]

Naw you only need a single 160! Send the others to me :lol:

Do you have a specific problem you are trying to solve or just "itchy" . I'd move the swap file to a different drive from your OS. You could consider putting the two 160s in AID0 or RAID1. I have a similar setup and all my pics. music and movies are on a RAID 1 array.

5c

UD.

 

[embowe]

Na...nothing is wrong..Im just "itchy" ...lol...would I actually see any improvement if I ran a raid setup on the 160's?

 

[UncleDave]

Na...nothing is wrong..Im just "itchy" ...lol...would I actually see any improvement if I ran a raid setup on the 160's?

RAID1 no improvement
AID0 some improvement <---- how much is a ongoing debate on the forum.

10c

UD

 

[Canuck1]

Are you saying your music is on the hard drive with Vista installed?

I would not have data, mp3 songs (for e.g.), videos etc. on the drive that holds the OS. I would move the songs onto a 'storage' drive. In the space (if that is on the drive that includes Vista), I would install another OS. Install Linux or another Windows OS. Linux is free so I recommend intalling some distro.

The changes would be minor. Vista is already 98GB which is fine and then you could have two Linux distros at approx. 30GB each, for e.g. or even 4 at around 15GB/each. Most distros can read (and even write to) NTFS partitions with the ntfs-3g driver.

The reason to have a separate drive for storage is so you don't have to worry about accidentally destroying it if you ever have to reinstall Vista/XP (i.e. your Windows OS). Although, it's good to have it in another partition, why worry about it at all? You can even get a cheap eSATA bracket so you could have an internal drive in an enclosure. That way, the 'storage drive' doesn't have to be connected to the computer if you don't need it at the time.

This is what I'm going to be doing.

Windows Vista/XP can easily access any of the storage drives if it has an NTFS partition.