Why Have a Boot Drive?

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vexion

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 20, 2008
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So first a disclaimer: I know very little about storage options, so in the past I've always shied around RAID setups and such.

On the machine I'm using right now, the main drive is partitioned into a boot partition and a main partition. Since the computer came this way, I'm not sure how much booting from a dedicated partition increases speed. But one little (little) thing that irks me is having to change to drive letter on the default install location for every single program I install.

I'm building a tentative new system after Thanksgiving, and thought I'd start fresh learning about RAID arrays and everything else. The system will be used for high-end gaming, movies, whatever. I'm not looking for anything more than 1TB of storage. So from a performance/ease of use ratio standpoint, what would you guys recommend? Just buy a 1TB drive, install Windows on it, work and play on one drive? Or have a small boot drive and two 500GB drives in RAID 0?

Any help would be appreciated!
 
Typically an OEM will partition a drive in that manner so it has a secondary partition where the "restore" or recovery data is located. Technically the other partition, because it's the boot partition, is Active and then hands off control to the OS which is of course installed on the other partition (the non-boot one). This has some benefits as most virus activity that exists for the intent of creating havoc with your OS partition will never affect that secondary one.

Because of that, recovery/restoration becomes a possibility and much easier to accomplish. There are other reasons, but in my experience that's the most logical response I ever received when I queried a system builder for a major OEM. The secondary drive doesn't necessarily need to contain a full backup either as some OEMs choose to do with those "Press F(unction key (x)) to begin the system restore" or whatever they may happen to call the process.

Makes sense to me
 
I see. My computer came with one hard drive split into two partitions, one smaller with Windows installed on it (along the line of 40GB, methinks) and the other larger and empty. So the "boot partition" is actually the larger, emptier one, and the smaller partition houses the OS and is handed control after boot?

I'm trying to decide where to go with this new build for about 1TB of total space.
  1. The Easy Way Out - One 1TB drive, install Windows on it, no partitioning.
  2. The Annoying Way Out - One 1TB drive, partition, install Windows on one, install everything else on the other. Change drive letters every time I want to install something.
  3. The RAID 0 Way Out - Two 500GB drives. As I understand it this will give me faster times overall, but no added redundancy.
  4. The RAID 0 Plus One Way Out - Two 500GB drives, one 40GB drive. Install Windows on the 40GB, put the others in RAID 0 for 1TB of storage and fast access times.
  5. The Easy Way Plus One Way Out - One 1TB drive, one 40GB drive. Install Windows on the small drive, use the 1TB drive for everything else. This is just the same as Option 2, with more physical drives in there and less partitioning, no?

Still completely in the dark as to what I should do. Anyone have any tips for the new guy?
 
Id go with a 40-80gb hard drive for the OS if using XP, or a 160-320gb hard drive for the OS if using Vista. Install all your programs games and what-not onto the same drive as the OS. Apps can be reinstalled afterall, and if the os is screwed over by a virus, most apps need to be reinstalled anyway since they put data in the registry.

Keep all your data on a 1tb. If by raid you mean raid built into the MB, don't use that. If the motherboard fails you may not be able to carry the raid over to a new MB.

Read my sig and you'll see what I have in the line of HDD space. No raid setup.
 
I'll be using Vista Ultimate 64-bit.

How about using a 10,000 RPM drive? You're suggesting installing the OS and games/apps on the same drive, so should I use a Velociraptor as my main drive and a standard 7200 RPM 750GB or 1TB drive for storage? What sort of performance differences would I see? I'm not gung-ho about ridiculously fast boot-up times, but I do want the best possible gaming performance.

The price difference is kind of staggering...

120GB Western Digital 7200 RPM 8MB Cache - $42
150GB Western Digital Velociraptor 10,000 RPM 8MB Cache - $180
 
You'll notice faster load times with that velociraptor for sure, but I'm not sure exactly how much faster. Really the only time the hard drive is used during gaming is when its loading textures and what not. Its up to you if the price difference is worth it.

I have a 320gb seagate for my os/app/game HDD and I get a 5.9 on the hard drive rating. Not that vista's experience rating has much value. Before, the 80 was my OS drive and that sucked.

A 7200 RPM drive for storage is perfect (though all my hdds are 7200RPM). I watch 1080/720p tv shows, anime, and movies all the time from them and I have never had a frame skip. I get data transfer speeds between my hard drives of around 50-80 Megabytes per second depening on what I'm doing at the time. a 10,000 RPM HDD wont improve transfer speeds as much as it improves seek times.
 
Well, now I'm just split between one drive or two.

I want about 1TB of total space. Should I have a smaller (160-320GB) drive for the OS and app installs, and a larger (750?) for storage? Or should I just buy one 1TB drive and put it all on there? How big a performance difference will I see?
 
2 drives is much preferable to having one drive.
However, if you can afford another drive soon, get one large drive for now.

for example
You can extract large archives from one drive to another, this takes much less time if its not writing to the same drive its reading from.
When you re-organise your drives, much of the copying will be between drives and will be about twice as fast.
It can be argued its better to have the swapfile on a second drive but its a moot point really as it only gets used lots when you run out of ram. This makes gaming a chore, so if that happens get more ram :)

Something useful...
I found that on a dual partition hard drive, when I deleted the c: partition and recreated it, it was no longer the boot partition as the other partition was made active after deleting the first partition.
Problem is, I didnt spot this until I had installed windows, not realising that the boot files were not on the Windows partition so Windows was no longer drive c: !!
This sounds like your setup.

To prevent yourself from doing the same thing, either erase all partitions and recreate your intended drive C: then drive D: partitions in that order...
Or change the Active drive with a DOS boot disk or with Disk Manager if you have Windows installed on another drive.
This will make the Windows drive C: again before you install Windows :)

Its a good idea to have a smaller partition for the Windows drive as then it wont fragment the larger storage space, it takes less time to scan for system virii/malware and takes a lot less time to defrag.
 
vexion said:
I'm trying to decide where to go with this new build for about 1TB of total space.
  1. The Easy Way Out - One 1TB drive, install Windows on it, no partitioning.
  2. The Annoying Way Out - One 1TB drive, partition, install Windows on one, install everything else on the other. Change drive letters every time I want to install something.
  3. The RAID 0 Way Out - Two 500GB drives. As I understand it this will give me faster times overall, but no added redundancy.
  4. The RAID 0 Plus One Way Out - Two 500GB drives, one 40GB drive. Install Windows on the 40GB, put the others in RAID 0 for 1TB of storage and fast access times.
  5. The Easy Way Plus One Way Out - One 1TB drive, one 40GB drive. Install Windows on the small drive, use the 1TB drive for everything else. This is just the same as Option 2, with more physical drives in there and less partitioning, no?

Still completely in the dark as to what I should do. Anyone have any tips for the new guy?
Click to expand...


Um, I cant believe no one else noticed this, BUT, if you have 2 500g HD in raid 0, you are only going to get about 465 gigs of actual storage. NOT 1 TB. I may be misunderstanding what youre saying, but figured it better to say something than not. On my own personal PC I am using a WD Raptor 10k Sata for my boot device, and the other 1500 gigs is on other drives that are used for storage only. Personally I prefer to stay away from RAID because I have tried using the inexpensive raid controller cards and didnt have good experiences. Plus, as already stated, transferring a raid array to another setup is tricky, at best. Im very happy with my setup, but like all things in the pc world, theres probably 6 ways to achieve what you want.

To help you some more, what is your budget? How dead set are you on having 1 TB ?? I would buy 2 1Tb drives, partition them both identical. Maybe split it something like 20 gigs for OS and the rest for data. I wouldnt bother using raid of any kind, just some sort of backup program. Back up your OS to the other drive in the small partition, and back up all your data to the larger partition. Im not %100 sure, but I just started using Drive image XML to back up my OS drives, and am very thrilled with it. I dont know if you could do a disk to disk copy using a split partition or not, but definately look into it.
 
jay2472000 said:
Um, I cant believe no one else noticed this, BUT, if you have 2 500g HD in raid 0, you are only going to get about 465 gigs of actual storage. NOT 1 TB.
Click to expand...

Uhmmm... what school taught you that math, buddy? 500GB drives have roughly 460-470GB of available space when properly formatted because of slack and that binary math at work again, so having two such drives would mean double the space so roughly 925-950GB of usable storage space that's then seen as one volume if used in a RAID 0 configuration.

No clue where you're getting that idea that somehow RAID 0 means losing half the drive space unless you're actually referring to RAID 1 which is drive mirroring and means - in the long run - you'd have ~465GB of usable space on one drive that is mirrored in real-time to the second drive which should have exactly the same ~465GB of space.

Saw that math and did a double take followed up by a "WTF?!?!" head snap and decided I had to point out the flaw in it. I'm guessing he meant RAID 1 because that would indeed have only ~465GB of usable space; the mirror drive isn't usable as extra storage as it mirrors the first.

Just wanted to clarify that...
 
Ahhhh, YES!!!!!!! I knew I was thinking something was wrong. I apologize, I was confusing Raid 0 with Raid 1. Ty for correcting me, I knew something didnt quite feel right about that, /dur dur dur.
 
jay2472000 said:
Ahhhh, YES!!!!!!! I knew I was thinking something was wrong. I apologize, I was confusing Raid 0 with Raid 1. Ty for correcting me, I knew something didnt quite feel right about that, /dur dur dur.
Click to expand...

lol great first post :p
 
Nenu said:
lol great first post :p
Click to expand...


Hey, it DOES say No0bie next to my name ~.^ haha, I registered for this kind of abuse? I like it already,,, At any rate, yeah, I messed up, please disregard previous comments. I have WAY too much going on right now and my brain has been full of PC stuff the last few days.
 
Thank you Nenu, and to the OP, I just went thru a nasty Raid 0 situation, I backed up 500 gigs to an external, found an old (and working) pci graphics card, so I decided to go ahead and upgrade my NAS pc , plugged it in, machine went BSOD, raid card died and I was screwed. If I hadnt backed up just literally minutes before, I would have lost everything. And yeah, it was all mainly junk (my +movies+ and stuff) but still, its a lot of hours to fill up 500gigs, so I would not recommend raid 0 without some sort of backup, trust me, it hurts to lose 500 gigs of anything.
 
If money is not an issue, then get the VR.

If cash is tight, then the current 7200 drives are still pretty fast.

I personally am running my OS on a 500 gig 7200.11. I have it partitioned for 100 gig for XP, 100 gig for Vista (which I aint using much yet,) and the rest for local data. I aint using the local data as I have a NAS to share data between my 6 comps.

I do not recommend Raid as it adds a significant level of complexity for somewhat spotty gains. But if that does not bother you, by all means play around with it. Just remember to keep a backup of important data.

Don
 
OP here. I'm a sucker for simplicity. I just bought my parts: went with 1 320GB drive and 1 750GB drive. OS and apps on the small one, data on the large one.

Thank you guys for all the input!
 
vexion said:
OP here. I'm a sucker for simplicity. I just bought my parts: went with 1 320GB drive and 1 750GB drive. OS and apps on the small one, data on the large one.

Thank you guys for all the input!
Click to expand...

KISS is not a bad policy if you are looking for a nice reliable system.

Don
 
I realize the OP found his answer and made his decision but I'm facing the same question and I know it comes up quite often.

I wanted to clarify one thing. Lets say I choose the ever popular 640GB WD hard drive and partition about 200GB for the OS (Vista 64) and apps and use the rest for storage. If the OS becomes damaged or corrupted how would I recover my data that is sitting on the non-OS partition?
 
CRXican said:
I realize the OP found his answer and made his decision but I'm facing the same question and I know it comes up quite often.

I wanted to clarify one thing. Lets say I choose the ever popular 640GB WD hard drive and partition about 200GB for the OS (Vista 64) and apps and use the rest for storage. If the OS becomes damaged or corrupted how would I recover my data that is sitting on the non-OS partition?
Click to expand...

If the OS was simply corrupted, you would either repair or reinstall the OS, reinstall your apps, and the data would then be available on the other unaffected (you hope) partition. You could also just move the drive to another system, or into an external enclosure, and access your data that way.

If the drive itself is starting to die, then getting to your data is hit or miss. That's why you would still need to make backups of any important data.

BTW, 100 gig would be plenty big for an OS partition. That's what I run.

Don
 
DonDon said:
If the OS was simply corrupted, you would either repair or reinstall the OS, reinstall your apps, and the data would then be available on the other unaffected (you hope) partition. You could also just move the drive to another system, or into an external enclosure, and access your data that way.

If the drive itself is starting to die, then getting to your data is hit or miss. That's why you would still need to make backups of any important data.

BTW, 100 gig would be plenty big for an OS partition. That's what I run.

Don
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. I saw you mention the 100GB partition and also that you're running XP. Vista is a little bit more of a hog so I'll probably go at least 120GB to be safe.

Then again, I'm still considering a separate drive just for the OS and programs and one for storage. Hard to argue with a Raptor 150 and the WD6400AAKS. Would make for a mean pair.
 
CRXican said:
Thanks for the reply. I saw you mention the 100GB partition and also that you're running XP. Vista is a little bit more of a hog so I'll probably go at least 120GB to be safe.

Then again, I'm still considering a separate drive just for the OS and programs and one for storage. Hard to argue with a Raptor 150 and the WD6400AAKS. Would make for a mean pair.
Click to expand...

Once the economy settles down, I will be looking to raid a couple of Raptors myself. I will prolly dig around on Ebay and pick up a couple of the last generation raptor 150s. I figure they should drop somewhat in price after the holidays.

Make sure you put a page file on the 640.

Don
 
DonDon said:
Once the economy settles down, I will be looking to raid a couple of Raptors myself. I will prolly dig around on Ebay and pick up a couple of the last generation raptor 150s. I figure they should drop somewhat in price after the holidays.

Make sure you put a page file on the 640.

Don
Click to expand...

I must admit the Raptors are not the most economical in terms of GB/$ but this next build is for my dad so I'm playing with his money and he has pretty much said money is no object. Despite that, I'm trying to get him the best bang for his buck.

As for the page file thing, I've seen it mentioned before but would have no clue as to how to go about doing that.
 
CRXican said:
I realize the OP found his answer and made his decision but I'm facing the same question and I know it comes up quite often.

I wanted to clarify one thing. Lets say I choose the ever popular 640GB WD hard drive and partition about 200GB for the OS (Vista 64) and apps and use the rest for storage. If the OS becomes damaged or corrupted how would I recover my data that is sitting on the non-OS partition?
Click to expand...

Re-install the OS. Thats the point of having it on a seperate partion. Or put the HDD in another PC. Usually what screws up one partition shouldn't affect another. YRMV.
 
CRXican said:
I must admit the Raptors are not the most economical in terms of GB/$ but this next build is for my dad so I'm playing with his money and he has pretty much said money is no object. Despite that, I'm trying to get him the best bang for his buck.

As for the page file thing, I've seen it mentioned before but would have no clue as to how to go about doing that.
Click to expand...

Having the page file on a separate drive helps if you have mulitple programs open. If you are going to put 4 gig of ram in it, and why not at these prices, then it prolly won't matter much anyways. If you are running 64 bit windows, then go with 6 or even 8 gig.

Unless of course you are using DDR3. That stuff is still a bit pricey.

That's the only thing I would have done different on my last build. I went with 2 gig of cas 4 ram instead of 4 gig of cas 5.

Don
 
I have the same question. Will this work?
320gb Seagate 7200.10 16mb OS
640GB Seagate 32mb for games/everything else
Will be using Vista.
 
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