Two hard drives, which setup will yield best performance?

[Rericksen]

I have two drives... a 2tb 6gb/s sata drive 32 mb buffer, and a 1 tb 3gb/s 16 mb buffer. Both are seagates, I can dig up the model numbers when I get home if it would help.

I want to make maximum use of the faster drive for gaming. My question is mostly if I should put both the OS and games on the same C drive, or if it would speed up access during level loads and streaming if it was a separate D drive (thus using the weaker drive for the OS itself, plus static storage like movies and stuff that won't be 'on the fly' intensive.

Will I gain any performance by having them separated, or am I just thinking too hard about this? I can easily get by with the single 2tb drive if it won't matter, and can move the one tb drive into the media server or what have you...

Thanks for any insight!

 

[nhasian]

make the larger drive your primary drive for both your os as well as your games.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

I'd stick with the larger drive, partitioned so as to keep it performing in Day 1000 the same as it performs on Day 1. The problem is that as your system ages, windows files thru updates get scattered all over the drive, your page file gets fragmented and the games will be all over the place.

Putting the OS on say a 64GB C drive forever keeps all OS files on the outside portion of the disk. The outer edges are twice as fast as the inside edges......next put games partition ..... leave data and backups for the inside edges of the platters.

Again, Day 1, you'd be hard pressed to see a difference between one big C:\ drive and the above scenario ..... but 12-18 months down the road, the differences is readily observable.

 

[Rericksen]

Having a google around for short stroking. The results when googling the words stroke and hard were surprisingly on track.

I've partitioned the one big one for a 200gb OS, 200gb games, and all the rest in a dumping ground for whatever.

Thanks all for the input.