Which harddrive to install OS on?

[cybereality]

Here's my deal. I'm building a system with a WD Raptor X 150GB 10K RPM drive and at least one Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB 7200 RPM. I am considering getting 2 of the Barracuda drives to run in Raid-0, but I'm still researching this (never done raid before). What I'm trying to figure out is which drive should be my main drive where I install XP.

The issue I'm having is that I need to do a dual-boot setup with XP32 and Vista x64. The XP system will be mainly for work, vista system for gaming and general internet use, etc. I would like to go all 64-bit with Vista at some point, but clearly there is still a lot of stuff that only works on XP. So a dual-boot is really my only option here. Since the XP machine will be more for work, I'd like to have this as stable as possible which is why I was planning on installing that on the Raptor X (not on raid). Then have the Vista system on the 1TB drive.

Is this the way to go? Does where I install the OS really matter all that much between those 2 drives? I could also partition the RaptorX and install both OS on that drive if it would be an advantage but I'm not really sure. Anything else I should know about before I get into the whole dual-boot thing?

 

[BartY]

I'd partition the Raptor and install both OSs there, no RAID. There is some performance advantage to be had from RAID 0, but you've also doubled the chance of data loss, since there is no data redundancy with RAID 0. Store your data and install applications (save things like virus scanners, etc) on the 1TB drive. That way if the OS takes a dump, you can simply rebuild it and be up and running relatively quickly.

 

[cybereality]

Ok, thanks man. That sounds like a good solution. I was just seeing if there were some huge performance benefits I might not know about but I guess it shouldn't matter.