Should game be installed on separate HD?

It is good to have that yes as your boot drive is needed for some other tasks, also it is also advisable to have your swap file on a different hard disk from your games drive and boot drive too.

I've been giving this subject a lot of thought and devoting a lot of time to researching it, over the last few months. At this time, my ideal set up would look like this:

OSes: Two 36GB Western Digital 10K Raptors in RAID0

Programs (including games): Two 150GB Western Digital 10K Raptors in RAID0

Paging File: 36GB Western Digital 10K Raptors in RAID0

Storage: 500GB Western Digital SATA

For a long time, I was planning on getting an SAS compatible controller card and going for the 15K Seagates for the drives that I would want to see a lot of speed out of (gaming, paging file, and OS drives). I've read benchmarking results on another website that have made me abandon this idea. The 15k Seagates are built specifically with server roles in mind (DB, etc.) and the Raptors beat them hands down in things like OS boot times and game level loading times. The rotational speed of the drive is definitely not the only thing to consider when looking for fast access times.

The only thing at this point that I'm still up in the air about, is the paging file setup. Wasting two Raptors for a 4GB paging file seems excessive. I've wanted to see some hard numbers regarding some of the newer storage technologies (SSD, hybrid drives, the new expansion card RAM drives, etc.) compared to some existing solutions, but I can't find anything.

Thats a lot of drives, 7 drives on one computer??

one drive for OS/page file, one for games/apps, and a large drive for storage should get the job done



you could also consider using an older computer for storage purposes

ive got my main computer that i use to play games, do work, chat, and so on, it has only one drive and it loads games/apps fairly quickly
i think i would only go so far as adding two more drives in raid0 to speed things up and throw all the games/programs on there and keep the OS/page file on the single drive

ive also got an older computer that i use to store music on and i just access it over the network from my main computer and from my laptop.

The way I have things on my system is:

Operating System + Programs:

Are on Drive C:\ that is comprised of 2X 160GB Maxtor drives on Raid0 this includes a second partition for D:\ My Documents.

Games:

Are on Drive E:\ that is comprised of 2X 200GB Maxtor drives on Raid0

Storage + Page File:

They are on Drive F:\ that is made up of 2X 250GB Seagate drives on raid0, this drive is used for the page file because when ever storage is being used I will not need the page file and visa versa.

i did have 2 drives, one for games and one for boot and things did run alot smoother but not noticably faster. I used the faster drive for games and the slower for OS and other applications.

though i was still using ultra ATA, and never did actually notice any difference in loading times for games.

since I've gone SATAII, I'm not looking back except for using as backup and storage.

too many hard drives, however, can mean that more stuff can go wrong, and put more load on your PSU. But providing that things are kept in check, it will work.

There was a article, from a few years back, I believe on Toms or Guru3d. The reviewer did tests with and without a pagefile. What he found was that, with the speed and amount of ram in systems then, you don't need a pagefile.

You would need at least 2 gigs of memory to do it though. His system actually ran noticeably faster in his tests. It was a clean system also. I've done this and didn't have any issues with most games but I also like to run a lot of background programs. So that uses up my memory. But nowadays this isn't much of a problem as most gaming folks have 4 gigs.

Having your pagefile on a separate hard drive was useful for Windows 2000. With XP it is really not necessary. And having your games run on a different hard drive then your OS is only going to cause extra I/O, but thats about it.

If you were running a server, then yes, put your OS on one drive / array and your data on another. This will balance the load better. For a gaming machine? 7 drives in one box is just plain overkill.