Consensus on file/program organization?

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GJSNeptune

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Mar 31, 2004
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It's been beaten to death, but I wanna hear it from you guys. Is it best to keep the OS on one drive and install programs/games to another? Or is the performance increase insignificant? I can't afford any SSDs. I have two WD6400AAKS drives, a WD2500AAKS, and two WD10EADS for storage.

Seems like I'm wasting my OS drive because it has just under 600GB but I'm installing games to another drive, and I keep my media files on a storage drive (hopefully someday I'll have a WHS box). Should general apps be kept with the OS?

I'm currently running XP Pro, but I'll be installing Windows 7 64-bit soon. I'm just unsure of how I should organize data across my hard drives.
 
i personally keep my os on one drive and data on the other..

so if I have to reinstall... reinstall o/s and all apps and good to go...
 
You mean you keep your OS and apps on one drive, and games and files on another? What do you mean by data?
 
Could I put Windows 7 on my main rig and get a second key to put it on my future HTPC?
 
generally I tend to keep my apps installed on a separate partition as well. not all programs need to reinstalled. on the off chance that they do whatever settings you had before wiping windows will be maintained via the .ini or other files already in that folder. that is unless the developer thinks that people ONLY install things on C. which at this point is getting more common.
 
I don't frequently reinstall Windows. I keep my installation relatively clean, or clean enough to keep it. Whenever I do reinstall, I know which apps I still use, games I still play, etc.
 
GJSNeptune said:
I don't frequently reinstall Windows. I keep my installation relatively clean, or clean enough to keep it. Whenever I do reinstall, I know which apps I still use, games I still play, etc.
Click to expand...

that's cool, but if you don't need to waste your time reinstalling those things all the better. which is why I do it. like I said somethings will still run without needing to be installed again. for example some games will run right out of a folder. some games need to be installed again IE red alert 2
 
You will get your best performance if you install your apps on a second hard drive, since the OS can be doing it's thing on the main drive while the second drive is doing it's thing for the app you are loading. You can also add a page file to the second drive to help speed things up too if you want. I personally like to install the apps on the OS drive for simplicity. But any data that needs to be saved goes on the NAS.

Now HOW MUCH it speeds things up is very difficult to benchmark. You can try a stopwatch to see if things open faster. Or if you have a specific task that you can time. It won't increase your frame rates in games, but may help load times a bit.

Don
 
The short answer is that the more spindles you have to spread the work over, the faster it will be.

If you have the OS on one drive and apps on another, you can be accessing the OS files and the app files at the same time. If they were on the same drive, the drive's read/write head could only be in one place at a time and would have to go back and forth between the two.

Simply installing the OS on one drive and apps on a second is a good, basic way to split the load. RAID0 is that same idea taken to the next step. Windows sees it as one drive, and the RAID controller handles splitting the load between the two drives. This means that every single drive access is actually spread over two drives.

Compare that to the simple OS/apps split, where the OS drive might not be doing anything, while the apps drive chugs away opening big game files. In this case, you're going to get overall performance similar to a single drive, since one drive is idle a lot, and it's just the second drive doing a lot of work.

With RAID0, it alternates back and forth between the drives for all accesses:
Code: 
1 3 5 7 9
2 4 6 8 0

With just OS/apps split up, it can access both simultaneously, but won't necessarily, depending on exactly what data you're accessing off which drive:
Code: 
1 3     7 9 0
2 4 5 6 8

Since you have a pair of WD6400AAKS drives, it would probably be best to RAID0 them if possible. This would ensure that you're always splitting the load evenly over both drives (even if you're accessing only OS data or only app data). This also means only one drive showing up in Windows, so you don't have to remember which drive is for what or worry about putting something in the wrong place (though it doesn't sound like that would be a problem for you). You can still partition the RAID0 if you want, to short-stroke it or just for your own organizational preferences.

The biggest issue with RAID0 is that it doubles your chance of data loss. If one drive fails, the bytes on the other drive are useless as well. But that's why you have separate storage drives, where you keep all your important stuff, right? =)
 
I'm not obsessed with hard drive performance, but I do like things being neat and clean. I've never used a RAID, but I would probably build a WHS box for that instead.

I should start getting into imaging.
 
Another thing to consider is actually micromanaging the file arrangement on the drive. JkDefrag/MyDefrag lets you sort all files by different criteria. You can sort everything by filename, which should put all of a program's files together on the drive.

That would put the files in order like this:
Apple\file.dll
Apple\file.exe
Apple\file.hlp
Bungie\file.dll
Bungie\file.exe
Bungie\file.hlp
Bungie\1\file.dll
Bungie\1\file.exe
Bungie\1\file.hlp
Corel\file.dll
Corel\file.exe
Corel\file.hlp

You can see how this will keep all of a specific program's files together, which should mean less jumping around when loading that program's data. However, any new data added to the drive (like a patch or upgrade for an app) will be put in available space, not with the program's existing data. You'll need to re-sort the whole disk to rearrange it and put the new data together with the old data.
 
GJSNeptune said:
You mean you keep your OS and apps on one drive, and games and files on another? What do you mean by data?
Click to expand...

sry...

i keep the O/S and anything " Installed " on my main drive..
then have a second drive I keep all data.... data consists of documents (word, pdf, wifes college docs, etc), also consists of a backup of game character folders or important info i would need in case of a restore....

if I have a problem I know I "SHOULD" be able to boot up on a dvd.. reinstall O/S, reinstall Apps and maybe copy a few game folders over.....

that is how I do it..
but with windows home server (currently installing and setting up...) im not sure how im going to do my backups now....


also page file.... who needs one of them????? with 8gb ram I turned it off.... maybe not needed but my system runs just fine.... :p
 
TeleFragger said:
also page file.... who needs one of them????? with 8gb ram I turned it off.... maybe not needed but my system runs just fine.... :p
Click to expand...

Even if you turn page filing off, windows is not happy unless it is using a page file. If you go and look at the root of your system drive, you will find a file called pagefile.sys and it will be in use. You may have to turn on view system files to see it, but trust me, it is there. :eek:

Windows can be really annoying at times.

Don
 
If you are turning off your page file completely, it is quite obvious you have no understanding of Windows and its memory management. There has been countless threads on this.
 
I typically have my page file on another drive, but I just recently had to reinstall Windows, and I forgot about the pagefile. I'll be moving that to my second WD6400AAKS, which also has my game installs.
 
At the very least, have a small (20-30GB) partition for Windows, and move your profile folders (Documents, Music etc) to a different partition. That way if you ever need to reinstall Windows/reimage it, your data stays current and is not affected. I usually don't mind reinstalling apps, unless they're portable then they can be kept separate as well.

I'm not too sure of the actual performance benefits of separating apps/Os. Usually the app code will get loaded to memory anyway, so having it installed on a separate drive won't do much good. The pagefile is a different matter.
 
Generally speaking, I separate some programs from the OS drive. All games are installed to a different drive and any program that doesn't need to be reinstalled and/or keeps it settings in the program's directory also get installed on a drive other than the OS drive. Some programs that have to be reinstalled with the OS end up on the OS drive. Oftentimes, these are programs I don't use much and aren't disk intensive so it's not a problem.

The OS is usually placed on the fastest drive. I also partition off a part of the drive for the OS and some programs. The rest of the drive is in another partition and normally used for storage of files which aren't accessed all that much or when accessed aren't going to be disk intensive. An example of this would be music and media files as well as software and drivers I keep backed up so I don't have to download it all again. This way I'm not "wasting" space on the physical drive the OS is installed on.

I keep disk intensive activities separated as much as possible. This is one reason I won't have less than two hard drives in my main system. As it is, I doubt I could do without three hard drives in my main system anymore.

 
DonDon said:
Even if you turn page filing off, windows is not happy unless it is using a page file. If you go and look at the root of your system drive, you will find a file called pagefile.sys and it will be in use. You may have to turn on view system files to see it, but trust me, it is there. :eek:

Windows can be really annoying at times.

Don
Click to expand...

Turned off the pagefile on my system, and deleted the pagefile.sys months ago, and I just verified there is no pagefile.sys in my system drive root. So what you're saying is not quite correct.
 
Dumb question here but I need to know.... When you guys are talking about putting data and programs on a separate drive and so forth, are you saying when you install something (like a game, ms office, and so forth) you're choosing a separate drive (or partition) rather than the default *start*programs* destination? I guess I'm looking for some clarification here. I typically keep my "movies ;) ," torrent downloads, music, pictures and so on stored on a separate hd in my system but I also have a lot of stuff on my main os hard drive. It's not really a problem until my os gets messed up or I have driver issues (usually video/audio drivers) and decide to reformat my main os drive and start with a clean slate. Then, I have to move everything off my main drive (including .cfgs for outlook and so forth), reformat, then reinstall my OS (Vista Ult. 64) and reinstall about 80 programs (at current count). - I usually don't install ALL of them right away (quicktime, divx, vnc, etc) but it's a pain in the ass to get things "back to where I was."

Please tell me I'm missing something simple and there's an easier way to organize my stuff!
 
This is how i have my HDD's setup

320GB - OS
320GB - Apps (Office, photoshop etc)
640GB - Games
1TB - Data (Music, movies, documents etc)

And I have a external hard drive for back up.

Also when installing the OS first thing I do it get it to put the user profiles on the Data Drive.
 
I have my OS in a 30GB partition.
The rest of that physical drive contains a second partition that contains all my data (pictures, movies, music, docs, pdf, emails, bookmarks, address books, saved games, ....) and all of my applications. This is drive D. Every time I install a program, I change the install drive from the default C to D.

I have a second physical hard drive mainly for backups. My data is automatically backed up to it.
It also contains a system-managed pagefile. I leave a minimum size pagefile (16MB) on my OS partition for coredump.
It also contains all my replaceable data like downloads, virtual drives, OS images, ...

All of this is done for convenience of data keeping and ease of OS imaging etc. It has nothing to do with performance.
I re-install my OS quite often and this setup let's me keep my data and programs isolated.
There are only a few programs that require a re-install. I don't mind a little bit of tweaking here and there to restore some program settings without having to re-install a program and re-enter all the settings.

A lot of these are personal preferences. One likes to drive a sedan while another may prefer to drive a truck. There is no right or wrong.
 
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