Newb question!! Raptor?

[Castell]

Building a rig pretty soon, and I was going to just install one big hard drive and put all my stuff in there but after a second thought, I've changed my mind and now I've been thinking on adding two hard drives...

I was planning on getting a
Western Digital Raptor WD740ADFD 74GB - 10k
and use that for the operating system, games, and applications (i.e: crysis, vista, photoshop)

and then install another

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB 7200k SATA 3.0Gb
for all other documents, music, movies, etc....

my question is, when it comes to installing, both use sata 2 cables I assume, and I create a partition on the raptor to install my vista, but I ALSO have to create a partition on my Seagate or else it won't show up in my drive lists in vista correct or it's a plug and play kind of thing?

I thought about going raid0 but I don't think it's for me, to my understanding, if half the file from the one hard drive gets corrupted you pretty much lost it so...

I'm coming from a very old maxtor drive so I'm excited to see the noticeable results from the raptor. I have a couple bucks to spare so I'm going to do this, but if you have any other recommendations, feel free to tell me them!

 

[bbz_Ghost]

The Raptor as a system/application drive and one big partition; the Seagate as a storage/data drive, maybe split into 2 or more partitions with each one used for one specific purpose.

Your original plan sounds the best, and will guarantee the best performance overall. RAID is something better left alone; for Joe Average, consumer that happens to own a computer, it's overkill and dancing with the Devil all rolled into one activity. It won't help you as much as you might think, or as much as the rumors and innuendo would have you believe. As I said, your original plan as I just repeated is the best path for your system.

 

[f1y]

Plug both drives in.. Turn it on. Format the raptor right before you install Vista on it.


Once you get to the desktop. Go under disk management and format the 500Gb. You should be good to rock.

 

[Castell]

Thanks guys! I didn't know you could format and partition in vista. I like the idea of making two partitions for the seagate and separating it.

Because I won't have the raptor filled with files and less things to load, I believe if I, for example, start up a game, and play music off another hard drive, I won't see any lag at all, oh this just sounds beautiful!! I'm wondering the load time on certain apps and OS compared to my crappy maxtor which has been pulling through for the last 5 years.

 

[bbz_Ghost]

Personally I would say plug in the Raptor and set that up first with Vista as you intended, and then plug in the Seagate after Vista is installed and add the secondary storage drive. Use Disk Managemet as instructed to do the setup/partitioning inside Vista.

The purpose here is keeping the drive letters working out so they don't get all confuzzled. I know it seems pointless because yes you can change the drive letters around at will with Disk Management, but why not do it right the first time?

Also, my recommendation is to make the Seagate one Extended partition (meaning the entire capacity of the drive) and then create 2 or more Logical drives inside the Extended partition). You're still stuck with the 3 Primary/1 Extended limitations in Windows unless you create Dynamic Drives (not going there), so, stick with the Raptor as your Active Primary drive and make the Seagate an Extended partition with Logical drives inside it.

Good luck...

ps
One last tip that can help out performance-wise: The Raptor is the king of the hill, yes, but even it's not that fast. Create a pagefile on the Seagate on the first partition you create (to place it near the very beginning of that physical drive), 2GB in size. That'll give you a secondary pagefile that Windows can access while it's reading from the Raptor when necessary, increasing overall system performance. I am NOT suggesting that you have only one - my suggestion is you create a second pagefile, 2GB in size, on the Seagate near the beginning of the drive. This works in conjunction with the "normal" pagefile on your Raptor/system drive and allows for smoother multitasking performance. So remember, when you set this up, you'll have a pagefile on each drive for a total of 2, not just 1.

 

[Castell]

ps
One last tip that can help out performance-wise: The Raptor is the king of the hill, yes, but even it's not that fast. Create a pagefile on the Seagate on the first partition you create (to place it near the very beginning of that physical drive), 2GB in size. That'll give you a secondary pagefile that Windows can access while it's reading from the Raptor when necessary, increasing overall system performance. I am NOT suggesting that you have only one - my suggestion is you create a second pagefile, 2GB in size, on the Seagate near the beginning of the drive. This works in conjunction with the "normal" pagefile on your Raptor/system drive and allows for smoother multitasking performance. So remember, when you set this up, you'll have a pagefile on each drive for a total of 2, not just 1.

Whoa lol! I was lucky enough to understand the extended partition part a bit but you lost me on this one.....

I understand the concept of the 'pagefile' as it acts as an index and instead of reading from the raptor, it reads off the seagate while the raptor does whatever it's doing, but under what circumstances would this be useful? and would it be a noticeable performance gain?

Now I'm hoping creating two pagefiles on two partitions is not hard, let alone positioning it at the begining of the hard drive?

and I thought I knew quite a bit about computers considering a built them before, but that was four years ago and I didn't worry about partitions let alone raid.

ahah, a lot of stuff to take into consideration. thanks for the great help!!! keep 'em coming =p!!!!

 

[unhappy_mage]

I understand the concept of the 'pagefile' as it acts as an index and instead of reading from the raptor, it reads off the seagate while the raptor does whatever it's doing, but under what circumstances would this be useful? and would it be a noticeable performance gain?

Page files come into use when swapping. If you don't have enough memory to run everything you want at once, this can make a big difference - but having more memory is very much preferred. Memory is thousands of times faster than disk.

Now I'm hoping creating two pagefiles on two partitions is not hard, let alone positioning it at the begining of the hard drive?

I don't think so, and I don't think you will either. In the screen where you select what disk to put Windows on, first make a partition of a few gigabytes (2 or so, personal preference) and then put the rest of the disk in one partition. Install Windows on the larger one. Then once you've got Windows installed, go to Disk Management, create a small partition and a big one. Then put a swap file on those disks.

 

[bbz_Ghost]

Page files come into use when swapping. If you don't have enough memory to run everything you want at once, this can make a big difference - but having more memory is very much preferred. Memory is thousands of times faster than disk.

I don't think so, and I don't think you will either. In the screen where you select what disk to put Windows on, first make a partition of a few gigabytes (2 or so, personal preference) and then put the rest of the disk in one partition. Install Windows on the larger one. Then once you've got Windows installed, go to Disk Management, create a small partition and a big one. Then put a swap file on those disks.

RAM is cheap, and yes having more of it can always help, but Windows is an operating system designed since day 1 to work with virtual memory, aka using the hard drive as "virtual" RAM space. It doesn't matter how much RAM you have, be it 2, 4, 8, even 16GB or more in some monster machines, if you're running Windows then Windows will always page, period. No websites, no FAQs, no guides, no "experts," no one can legitimately argue against that point, regardless of who, what, when, where, or why they say "they turned off their pagefile" or "I disabled my virtual memory" because Windows will just laugh in their faces and create a pagefile almost to spite those idiots.

Regardless, Windows will create a pagefile on your system drive that is a maximum of about 1.5 times the size of your RAM. If you have 2GB, it'll have a pagefile that maxes out at about 3GB, but will expand as necessary if the need arises. That's fine, that's precisely what you want and the suggestion is: Leave the system drive pagefile ALONE. PERIOD.

Now, adding another pagefile on a second physical drive allows Windows to do two operations at once: it can read from the one drive in a data operation, and it can write to the pagefile on the secondary drive if necessary. This is more efficient than having one single hard drive where Windows can't read and write at the same time: it would read data in, write something to the pagefile, read something in, write something, etc. I can't do two things at once, whereas with a pagefile on a separate physical drive, multitasking becomes vastly more efficient across the board.

What I meant by placing it at the front of the Seagate doesn't mean create a special partition just for the pagefile; that's inefficient, actually. Just partition the Seagate any way you want, and whatever partition happens to be the first one on the drive, put a pagefile on that partition and make it 2GB in size (2048 minimum, 2048 maximum). Creating a 'special partition' at the beginning of any drive is dreadfully inefficient: it forces the read/write heads to have to make that trip back to the beginning of the drive regardless of what's going on. Windows typically places the pagefile in the middle of a partition which is exactly where you'd want it to be on a system partition because in the middle of the drive it's always "in the middle" of the action. If you're writing to the end of a partition and it has to go all the way back to the beginning and then back to the end again, that's a lot of head travel and wasted access time. Having it in the middle means it gets "hit" either way.

That's it.

You can create/modify pagefile sizes and locations by pressing the Windows key + the Pause key (fastest way to get to System Properties), then click the Advanced tab - Performance, Settings, Advanced, Change. My suggestion is set a size of 2048 as the minimum/maximum which creates a static pagefile (doesn't change size often and helps to keep it from becoming fragmented in some situations).

Set that 2048 min/max for the system drive (it'll probably be C: of course), and then whatever the first partition/drive letter is on the Seagate, put another 2048 min/max pagefile on that, and make sure you do actually set the sizes and click Apply, then OK, then reboot to make it stick. After the reboot, go back ot the System Properties and verify that it shows two pagefiles, one on C: and one on the first partition/drive letter of the second physical drive.

After that, enjoy a smoother running operating system. And get more RAM too, it helps, but Windows is a disk based OS so, there's only so much you can really do.

But then again, with enough RAM you could put the pagefile on a RAMdisk... Hmmm... that's way over your head though.

Good luck...

 

[unhappy_mage]

if you're running Windows

Guess what I'm a Linux user. I have no swap partition anymore.

What I meant by placing it at the front of the Seagate doesn't mean create a special partition just for the pagefile; that's inefficient, actually.

How's that? If the file is created early in the partition's life, it'll be at the front. Look at the defragmentation screen. True, putting it on a partition confines it to that range of sectors, but the pagefile generally stays put anyways, especially using a fixed size.

 

[bbz_Ghost]

It's inefficient with respect to a Windows PC to have a special partition sitting at the front of a physical drive for pagefile duties. I know Linux/UNIX have prided themselves on having a "swap partition" for decades now, but Windows isn't as efficient at memory allocation and usage as those OSes are - ok, fine, I said it. The truth hurts, so we do what we can with what we have.

The best method realistically in the long run is to just leave it the fuck alone, honestly. There are some minor performance improvements by setting the system drive pagefile as static (same min/same max size) but in the long run over the course of time etc etc it's typically best to just leave it alone - meaning the pagefile on the system drive.

Secondary pagefiles can be static and placed without issues at the beginning of a drive, but on the system drive you'll note that by default Windows tries to place it near the middle after a clean format and install. This is confirmed by looking at the disk layout in any degfragger where you'll see that big chunk of "stuff" in the middle range of the partition. That's where the pagefile and the MFT data get stored.

Why?

Because by being in the middle of the system partition it becomes more efficient in the long run as the heads sweep from front to back, back to front, etc. The middle is where it's at... less head travel to reach the MFT which gets constantly updated with nearly every read/write/delete/copy/move operation.

 

[Castell]

Good luck...

Thanks for taking your time to explain it along with everyone else who helped.
I plan on getting 4GB of ram for vista x64 (G.Skill)

In your personal opinion should I follow through this pagefile setup? I don't mind taking the time to learn, I always love learning new things, I just never heard of anyone doing this, sounds though like it would be a good idea, and doesn't seem to be to hard to accomplish. Thanks for all the help..again!