One drive or two

tias · Post by **tias** » Wed May 05, 2004 9:44 pm

For long I've been using two drives. One for OS + data and one for Storage. I'm trying to squeeze the last bit regarding silence in my rig and I'm thinking about partitioning my 160GB 7200.7 and getting rid of the 80GB. Is it just me who is too freaked out about this, or wouldnt it be better with just one disk? Less temperature, draws (just a bit) less power, and sounds less ofcourse. I have Pre-cut Acoustikit so the seeks don't bother me too much.

Would be great to know your hdd-setups when partitioning single disks :) I know performance still gets a bit better when having Photoshop scratch-disks, swapfile etc on another IDE-channel than Win, but but.. :)

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Thu May 06, 2004 7:23 am

I've been using one disk with a partition for the OS+apps and another partition for data for a long time now. I use a spearate disk (usually external) for backups.

I've always valued data integrity and low noise over all out performance when it comes to HDDs so I've never played around with putting the pagefile on different drives.

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Thu May 06, 2004 7:31 am

My policy is one drive per computer, partitioned into separate OS and data partitions (and swap, if applicable). Before that, I used separate drives for performance reasons.

Using a single drive with multiple partitions WILL adversely affect performance to some degree. Operations involving large amounts of data can involve a flurry of seeks between OS/swap partition and data partition. For example, compressing/decompressing a large archive may involve temporarily writing to the OS/swap and then copying over to the data partition. This is noticably slower with one drive than with separate drives.

When it comes to reducing noise, power, and heat, and increasing reliability, using one disk with multiple partitions is easily the way to go. It comes at a price in performance, though, depending on what you do with the computer.

Personally, I'd rather stick with one drive per computer.

tias · Post by **tias** » Thu May 06, 2004 7:43 am

Thanks for your input guys. I will probably partition up my 160GB and try it out.. It feels more and more unnecessary with more drives actually.

bomba · Post by **bomba** » Fri May 07, 2004 12:51 pm

For those doing clean 2-drive or 2-partition installs, you may want to try this to move your Documents & Settings folder to the data drive/partition, works great!

Also limits fragmenting of the system drive and puts all personal data, including outlook/outlook express e-mail & address book, internet favorites, etc. on the data drive/partition for simpler backup!