What is best way to set up drives on xp system

[sparks]

3 yrs ago I took my old system and used the 3 drives from it to build my nex xp system.
1 100G and 2 80 gigs

So I partitioned out an 80 gig to a 10 gig and a 70 gig.
I installed XP on the 10 gig partition. My thinking at the time
was Ghost image. I have a 1 gig image of my install and if it goes bonkers
I just put the image back. Small image at first install but over a year and a half
this got to the 2.4 G with some utilities I installed in C not thinking of course.
I tried to put all utilities on d drive the 70 gig partition that was on the primary drive.
Games went on the 100 gig drive.
Movies and pics on the other 80 gig.

In some ways this seemed like a waste of time, but later there was 2 times I had to put on an image to fix my system so that little backup that I did every month kept me from reinstalling everything on my system.

Opinions Ideas or how do you do your system with multi drives?




thanks for any ideas

ps I am building a new system this old system will go over to light duty the new system will be mainly gaiming, and about everything I guess.

At first I was going hey thats xp pro going in the corner...what on my new system.
IS pro a necessity for a home small lan user?
Will I ever regret saving $80 on this new system and putting XP home on it ?

sparks

[Phoenix86]

First thing to remember here is this is mainly an opinion kinda of question. You will get several people with various different opinions...

That being said my general setup is to seperate OS+Apps on one drive and "user" data (like anything you store in my documents, movies, pics, etc.) on another drive.

[hulksterjoe]

That being said my general setup is to seperate OS+Apps on one drive and "user" data (like anything you store in my documents, movies, pics, etc.) on another drive.

Same here.. Os+apps.. data on others

[sparks]

apps does that include games ?

do you do any type of system backup or
just reinstall on disaster?

sparks

[Phoenix86]

Games, yes.
Disaster recovery, no. I just reinstall as needed, which is something between rare and never.

[Penrow]

i have 2 drives 1 74 GB rartor and 1 250 Gb Maxtor. I have my 74 drive partitioned into 2 drives one is about 10 Gb and the rest is for windows the c drive. on the 250 drive i use it as sort of My documents folder music video and downloads and disc images of my important software disc. on the 10 gb partition i have a ghost image saved with a fresh install of windows with updates and drivers and all installed. and i also have a back-up copy Of my Money 2005 accounting software with all my checking stuff and all everytime i close money it updates this file. also on the 250 drive i have my Main Money File and another Ghost File so whatever happenns to either drive i have a aghost image to use and all my accounting stuff is safe since its all on 2 seperate drives. Plus a have a ghost image on a dvd and back-up my accounting stuff on a memory card reguarely. all my videos and music are also backed up on disc. when i add new video or pictures that aren't backed up i put them in special folders labeld"NOT BACKED UP" and then when they accumulate a good bit I burn them them onto a dvd so as to be sure not to be backing up the same stuff over and over Hope this helps

[djnes]

That's a lot of extra work involved. I have one 36 GB Raptor that has one partition (C). I keep Windows, and my apps and games installed here. I have a 120 GB Seagate drive with one partition (D) that is my storage drive. The Raptor is backed up to D using Norton Ghost on a thumb drive. I back the 120 GB drive up to my 250 GB USB drive, using a batch file.

[S1nF1xx]

Here's my setup. It's all done with ntbackup.

* All my computers have 1 HDD in them except my server which has 4.

* All of my data (movies, music, archived data, etc) is stored on my server. I do nightly backups to my server from my workstations (I don't backup the whole drive, just important data and saved games :p).

* My server backs up important data + the other backups to an external HDD. I also burn a DVD once a month with my most critical data on it and store it off-site.

*If a computer crashes, I just reinstall the programs, no worries about recovering data.

My motto: If it's not backed up in triplicate, it's not worth backing up.


I've lost important data once before. It will never happen again.

[ChingChang]

With my current system (5 years old) I have an 80gb drive for Windows and other software/games. I also have a 250GB drive that I use to store TV recordings/movies on, and I also put my pagefile on that drive. I read it is better to have the pagefile on a seperate drive than the OS, if both drives are the same speed.

I think I'll be building a new system sometime in January (I hope). I'm going to get a 74GB Raptor for this one for the Windows/Application drive, and one of the 300GB 16mb cache Maxtor drives for other stuff, unless I just decide to use the same drive I have now. And someday I'll make a file server with those 300GB drives... someday.


At first I was going hey thats xp pro going in the corner...what on my new system.
IS pro a necessity for a home small lan user?
Will I ever regret saving $80 on this new system and putting XP home on it ?

sparks
Yeah, definately go with Home Edition, unless you can get Pro for less (academic version). Pro doesn't offer much more than Home does. It supports multiprocessor systems (Home supports dual core, but no dual processor), and some extra network things.

[bob]

Ive got all my stuff that I would shit my pants if I lost, on a usb hard drive. all the folders are mirrored onto the IDE drive (around 10GB worth).

Then xp, games, programs, videos etc go onto my windows install drive. I really dont see a need for me to have 50 different partitions. Someone was telling me its better to split a hard drive up into like 10GB partitions because its faster. I dunno why, but just do what works best for your situation.

And if tape drives wernt so damn expensive... Oooh man would I be a bit more free to load up my hard drive with useless junk.

[ChingChang]

... Someone was telling me its better to split a hard drive up into like 10GB partitions because its faster. I dunno why, but just do what works best for your situation.

Yeah I read that too and tried it, but didn't notice anything. I think the reason was because the spindle didn't have to move as far to access files in a smaller partition, and it wouldn't become as fragmented.

Then someone here said the performance increase was negligible, or that there wouldn't even be a performance increase. I forget. So I stopped using partitions.

Partitions are just another way to organize your files. But if you have a lot of partitions, you'd probably end up wasting space if the drive got close to full, since there would be a little amount of free space on each partition, which might not be big enough to add more files to it, but if it was one partition, it could be enough for several files.

[djnes]

Someone was telling me its better to split a hard drive up into like 10GB partitions because its faster.
If anything, it would make the overall drive performance decrease.