How to set up two HD's?

[Sallad420]

Hi, I have replaced my wifes HD with a slightly larger one (my old 60GB) and bought a 120GB. So now I have an older 20GB and a 120GB drives for my computer.

So my question, should I set up WinXP on the 20GB and use the 120 as a secondary drive? Or install XP on the newer, slightly faster 120 drive and use the 20 GB drive for captures/scratch disk?

Right now I have it set up as this, 120 HD is Primary Master, 20 drive is Secondary Master, and my DVD burner is Secondary Slave.

Machine is a AMD 2000+, 640MB RAM, ECS K7S5A Pro mobo, Winfast 2000 deluxe capture card, GF 4200Ti vid card, Lite On 514 DVD burner, WinXP.

Thanks

[Capmaster]

Definitely put your OS on the newer, faster drive.

[alchemistresearch]

Whatever you decide you need to get the DVD burner on a channel away from the hard drive. Either buy a PCI IDE card or put the drives together as Primary master and slave, and the DVD as the secondary master.

When you say the new drive is faster, by how much? What RPM, cache and ATA are they?

Which ever drive you decide to put the OS on, set aside 4Gb for the swap file. It will prevent it from getting fragmented in with other files.

[lenti_75]

use the 120 for BOTH, and leave the old one for back-ups, or mp3 files...

[Suntan]

I agree with lenti_75, use the 20 gig as a backup drive. I have a 160gig logically split between C (15 gig) for OS and Proggies, D (15 gig) for my data, E (2 gig) for hers (and she know not to save anything unless it is to this drive), F (the rest) encoded media.

Then a second 80 gig ligically split between, G (40 gig) encodes in process, J (20 gig) backup, rest for a Fedora Core 1 distro that I am experimenting with.

I back up the D and E drives (along with all of my pictures on the media partition) to the backup drive about once a week as well as to a backup computer (via network) about once a month.

Regardless I would put the 120 (with OS) as Primary master and the 20 as Primary Slave and DVD Burner as Secondary Master.

-Suntan

[Alan69]

120's are fairly cheap now, get another!

If it's a good fast 20 it may be ok as the OS drive, but 20 is old enough it probably isn't. If you're capping then having the cap drive seperate from the OS drive makes it much less likely to lose frames etc even if you're doing other things on the computer. For just burning though not sure it's that important..

But if the 20's slow just get another 120, that is always the best answer..

And you do generally want the HD's on one channel and the burner on the other as master.

Alan

[SaSi]

I would install the OS on the 20Gb disk, then create a fixed size swap file as the first thing on the 120Gb disk.

Defragment the 20Gb disk as soon as the installation of OS and any s/w is finished.

The speed of the system disk is not critical. The speed of the swap file disk is critical, especially so if you have less than 512MB RAM. The speed of the data disk is crucial for efficient operation.

Let me explain, so that to avoid anyone jumping at me

The OS will start once. Will take slightly more on a slower disk. Once you do that, the speed of starting applications is more affected by a fragmented disk than by a slow disk.

Once you start the application, the performance of any data manipulation (e.g. capture or conversion) is directly proportional to the speed of the data disk.

If you run low in RAM, the swap file is used and it is critical that the SWAP file is on the fastest section of your fastest disk. The speed of any disk is max in the beginning (outer cylinders) and min at the end (inner cylinders).

[chas0039]

I agree totally with SaSi and I want to thank you for going out on the limb first. The experts at Maximum PC also tend to agree.

[redwudz]

I'm with SaSi also. Don't need that fast of HD for the OS. SWAP file and video, yes.

[Sallad420]

Thanks for your replys.

I set the OS on the 120 GB HD and are using the 20GB for backups, etc.

Thanks!